As soon as they were free of the Atrium, Aurora let herself breathe.

“Alright,” she said, doing her absolute best to keep her tone in check. “Care to explain what that was about?”

Colonel Weathers strolled beside her, eyes forward, her ghostly stripes stilled with what could only be described as professional calm. If she was ashamed or embarrassed in any way, it didn’t show. For a mare who easily stood a full head above anyone else in the Stable, it made her feel like she was walking beside a living statue.

Aurora took her down a side corridor away from the IT wing. She didn’t feel like fielding uncomfortable questions about why the server room still had power.

Weathers cleared her throat. “Frankly, I think it’s more pertinent to discuss why a ghoul is residing within your Stable. How long has it been here?”

It. The word stung like a barb. One of the deputies behind them opened his mouth to answer, but he stopped short when Aurora shot him a look. “That’s not important,” she muttered.

The colonel let out a tiny sigh. Whether it was an expression of disappointment or a hint toward a decision being made was up for debate. “I disagree,” she said. “Stable 10 is meant to be a time capsule for the old world’s strongest gene pool. The presence of a ghoul, no matter how brief, stands good odds of weakening a vital population.”

Aurora set her jaw and braced herself for the Enclave’s laundry list of reasons why the pegasi here had to remain pure, why Ginger had been a gracious exception, and why the mare who just lit into Weathers needed to leave immediately. If the colonel believed a neatly pressed uniform and a rank entitled her to dictate the terms of Aurora’s deal with Primrose, she could think again. Nothing was changing until she had confirmation that their ignition talisman was here, and even then Aurora would make sure Weathers was kept far away from any sources of communication until she had the talisman in her feathers. Let her chastise the far side of a locked door. She was done haggling over the terms of her home’s survival.

She frowned, then, when Weathers offered nothing else beyond her first dissents. Weird. Aurora glanced up at her wondering if she was waiting for a response, but Weathers continued to look straight ahead, her gaze occasionally pulled by the odd door plaque or the maze of conduits overhead. The Enclave never shied away from their open disgust toward ghouls before. She was leaving a lot on the table.

“That’s it?” she prodded. “You’re not going to tell me I have to kick her out?”

Weathers pursed her lips and glanced away. “I’m trying to decide if I have that authority.”

Aurora blinked. Then it clicked. “You recognized her, didn't you? That’s why you let her talk to you that way.”

Weathers shuffled her wings with clear discomfort, her neutral mask slipping. “You wouldn’t be the first to attempt passing a synthetic reconstruction off as the genuine article.” After a long moment of walking in silence, she added, “But it’s… her reaction to me was too articulate to be encoded. That was her, wasn’t it?”

There were several parts of what the colonel said that Aurora desperately wished to dig deeper into, but she thought better of it. “Yeah, that’s her. Or what’s left of her.”

Weathers grew more troubled. She took a breath and risked a glance down at Aurora, wearing the same expression Julip had adopted when she began to more closely examine the lies she’d been raised on. “The archives all confirmed Rainbow Dash was in Fillydelphia when the bombs fell. If she’s been here this whole time, why didn’t she ever reach out to tell anyone she lived? The hope her survival could have provided in those first months after…”

Behind her, Deputy Chaser piped up. “Well, we only just brought her in a couple of weeks ago.”

If she had both hind legs, Aurora would have thought hard about kicking him in the shin. Weathers looked between the two of them, more perplexed than ever, and it wasn’t hard to tell she wouldn’t let something that significant go ignored.

“None of us knew she survived,” Aurora explained, leading her to the stalled lifts at the end of the corridor. She wasn’t looking forward to bumbling down more stairs on an already sore leg, but apparently this had become the tour Aurora promised and she wasn’t going to spend it walking laps around the residential corridors.

Besides, she wanted to touch base with her dad.

They filed into the stairwell and Aurora braced herself by grabbing the inner railing. “You know about the landslide that buried the tunnel, right?”

Weathers nodded. “Of course.”

“Rainbow Dash was one of a few hundred evacuees who got trapped inside.” She grimaced at the effort it took to do something as simple as walk down a flight of stairs. “Spitfire closed the Stable before any non-pegasi could make it inside. Rainbow didn’t arrive until after the door was sealed along with my friend Roach. The radiation did the rest. Don’t ask me how that works.”

She looked back at Weathers, who had gone silent. The officer stared through her toward the next landing, her plodding gait going tense.

“Yeah.” Aurora grasped the railing’s curve and bounced her backside around until she was facing the next set of steps. “We only knew about Rainbow living in the tunnel after I left home. She’s been on the edge of going feral for two hundred years and Roach spent all that time keeping her from going over. I guess she’s still working through a lot of that trauma. Sledge says ever since he brought her inside, she’s been getting better.”

Weathers shook her head as she rounded the landing. “Assuming your friend told you the truth… that’s a lot to process.”

“There’s footage, if you need proof.”

“I may. It might also help explain some of the things we found when we cleared the Rangers out of the tunnel.”

She tried not to imagine what “clearing them out” meant in practice, but something told her the Enclave hadn’t politely asked the last holdouts to go home. Her thoughts immediately pivoted back to the large mound of fresh rubble that had been deposited near the tunnel entrance, and the shattered suits of power armor thrown on top of it. If the Enclave had moved the bones left in the tunnel when Aurora first crawled into the wasteland, she hoped they did better than throwing them onto the pile.

Weathers hummed. “She’s missing a wing. Bringing her home is going to be difficult if she can’t fly on her own.”

Aurora slowed to a stop. “She is home.”

To her credit Weathers didn’t dismiss her outright, but the intention of overriding her was there all the same. “Did she tell you that herself?”

She started to answer but quickly found herself short on words. Even the deputies trailing them further up the stairs seemed unsure. Weathers had a point. Was life in Stable 10 really what Rainbow Dash needed if her survival carried with it the potential of inspiring the wasteland? Did anyone ask her what she wanted?

“I don’t know if Sledge has had that conversation with her yet.” She pointedly avoided the colonel’s gaze as she reached the next landing and limped toward the open door. “But she’s not going anywhere with you.”

The silence between them grew strained as Weathers ducked through the low doorway and followed her into the Hydroponics wing, and Aurora’s stomach clutched at the sight of so much disarray in what used to be a pristine place. The single wide corridor that bisected the entire level glowed with the same dim lights studded neatly along the ceiling. The normally spotless floors were smeared dark with clods of soil and mud, drawing tracks to and from the many permaculture labs throughout the wing.

Her chest tightened with a twinge of anxiety. It was too familiar to ignore. All the doors stood open allowing the disparate smells of mulch and disturbed soil to freely mingle, creating an odor similar to the decay they discovered in the gardens of Stable 1. She swallowed and focused on her breathing. This was different, she told herself. Everything was going to be okay.

Weathers noticed the change in her demeanor. “We can table this for later, if you like.”

“Appreciate it.” She responded a little more tersely than she intended. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. The sharpest edges of her discomfort dulled, allowing her to think more clearly. “Thanks, I mean,” she added, stepping deeper into the corridor. “This is our Hydroponics wing, where we grow our crops.”

As she passed the first pair of open doors, she had to bite back her shock upon seeing what used to be lush rows of spinach cut down to the soil. The next set of doors revealed the same. “At least I think we still do.”

At first blush, the gardens were a wholesale disaster. She’d never been formally trained by anyone but she had spent enough time hanging around her dad in her teenage years to pick up the basics. Everything that had fruited had been harvested and aggressively pruned back. In the gardens that had yet to mature, the emergency lights had been wrapped in black bags to induce early dormancy, or at least she thought that was the purpose. The soil was already cracking around the stalks of several vegetables, the remaining leaves yellowing around the edges. It would be months before the gardens recovered. Longer before the next harvest would be ready. The entire cycle had been disrupted.

The trickle of running water caught her ear, accompanied by a melodic humming she was hard pressed to forget. Her dad loved music as much as her mom had, and when Aurora was small and prone to playing with anything and everything she could get her feathers on, their bedroom record player had been strictly off limits. The cost the Fabrication team charged to build it had not been cheap, or so she’d been told many times over, nor had the records. Aurora smiled at the familiar murmur of Dear Hearts and Gentle People, her dad’s personal favorite.

She found him scrubbing lichens off the snap pea trellises in the sink basin at the back of PERMACULTURE 40. The vines had already been cut back and the peas plucked, save for a small wingful tucked into a shallow plastic container set beside the sink. She stopped at the doorway for a moment and watched him work, occasionally setting down a muddy scrub brush to pick a pea pod from the container and pop it in his mouth. Leave it to her dad to find the silver lining in the worst circumstances.

She tapped her hoof against the open door frame. “Hey Dad.”

Dusky Pinfeathers spun around like a colt caught with his feathers in the cookie jar, spotted his daughter, and gestured at himself with chagrin as he cheeked his purloined peas.

“Look who’s awake!” He reached back and turned the knob above the basin until the tap gurgled to a stop.

As Aurora stepped into the room, she noted the faint smell of bleach in the air. Hydroponics must have decided to take advantage of the situation and do a deep clean on their equipment before what was setting up to be an intense replanting season. She met him halfway down the rows and forgave him for the wet slap of feathers over her back as he yanked her into a hug.

“Sorry,” she chuckled, squeezing him back just to assure herself she was really here again. “I can barely remember what time it was when we got back. I still feel like I could sleep for another day.”

He gave her a firm pat before grabbing her shoulders and stepping back to assess. “How’s your leg? Did you go to the infirmary yet?”

She tried not to let her reluctance show. Doctors and Aurora didn’t exactly get along in the past, namely due to her long standing habit of dealing with work injuries on her own. The few times she’d been badgered into visiting Medical had been at Sledge’s behest when he threatened to give her a vacation if she refused. Somehow it was always the same doctor who saw her, a gray-maned stallion named Fetlock. He never failed to “charm” her with some anecdote aimed at chastising her for the little welding burns or the inevitable bruises along her wings marking the places that the generator had fought back.

The worst part always came at the end of each visit when he would inevitably chart her reproductive conformation. Every pegasus had to endure the annual embarrassment whether they’d entered into the breeding lottery or not, and Aurora was no exception. Tail up and over, a cold speculum, and the unnecessary “hm’s” and “mmhm’s” as he jotted down his notes. Then the unceremonious wipe to remove the excess lubricant and a not-so-subtle suggestion that if she were to enter the lottery, he had no doubt they would be as healthy as her.

Not even a fucking lollypop.

“Not yet, but it’s on the way,” she said, nodding back to the mare behind her. “I’m giving the colonel the poor mare’s tour of the Stable. Colonel Weathers, this is my dad, Dusky.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Weathers said.

Her dad nodded with the polite smile he reserved for anyone he privately disapproved of. Aurora tried not to grin at that. Point one for dad.

“Well you missed the big harvest,” he said, gesturing a damp wing toward the yet to be disassembled trellises sticking out of their dirt rows. “It’ll be a while before we’re back to complaining about bruised tomatoes, so until then we’ll be subsisting off what we can preserve. Hopefully by the time we run out we’ll have a new rotation ready. Otherwise we’ll need to start dipping into the dry stores.”

He chuckled to himself. “I wouldn’t want to be near Sanitation if that happens.”

Aurora snorted at that. When she was ten, her teacher took her class down to Supply to sample the freeze dried emergency rations the Stable kept stocked at all times. Artichoke hearts were bad enough on their own, but after being desiccated and stored for over a century, they made chalk look appetizing. They were also an excellent way to cancel a week’s worth of bowel movements, or so the rumors said.

Weathers listened, but her attention shifted to the sink he had been working at. “Is this also where you bury your dead?”

Aurora’s eyes widened. “That’s not–”

Her dad lifted his wing in well mannered reassurance and placed his feathers on Aurora’s shoulder, gently pulling her away from Weathers. “It’s alright. Our guest asked a very astute question.” He slipped into his field-trip voice without skipping a beat, having entertained many curious foals when their classroom came down to see where their food came from. “Yes, we do. It’s been our tradition since the Stable sheltered the first generation. We come from the earth, so it’s only natural we give ourselves back to the earth when our story ends.”

Weathers looked thoughtfully at one of the nearby plots and dipped the rim of her hoof through the dry crust of soil. “It’s very poetic.”

Aurora set her jaw. “It is, isn’t it?”

Weathers blinked at the hostility in her tone, but Aurora wasn’t about to open the floor to a public survey of her feelings. She turned to her dad who regarded her with a tiny smirk she hadn’t seen since the two of them almost burned the family compartment down trying to make dinner for her mom. It was a happy coincidence, Aurora thought, that she was planning something along the same lines for tonight.

“When are you planning to do dinner today?”

He smiled a little more broadly and looked upon the scraggly bits of vine that still clung to over half of the empty trellises. “As soon as I finish up here. Why? Do I finally get to meet the other half?”

Of course he knew. She rolled her eyes as he gave her shoulder a paternal squeeze. “I mean… yeah. I was thinking it’d be nice if the two of you got to know each other a little better.”

He was beaming. “I’d really like that, honey. Just the three of us, right?”

Winters looked away with a chuckle. Aurora ignored her.

“Just us. Any chance we could eat at your compartment? Mine’s kind of a mess, and I’m not sure how long it’ll be until everyone starts asking questions about the wasteland. I’m not sure how I should answer when they do.”

He gave her another squeeze and let her go. “Start with the truth and go from there. As for dinner, stop by the compartment after six and I’ll have something ready for us to eat. Just bring yourselves. You still know where it is, right?”

That cut a little, but she didn’t let him see it. “Six o’clock. We’ll be there.”

With that, he took a breath and looked between her and Weathers. “Well don’t let me keep you from the tour. I’m sure you have a lot more Stable to cover.”

She wasn’t so sure about that. Not far from where they stood was the garden where her mom had been laid to rest. After the crack about their burials, Weathers had just earned herself the abbreviated version. “Depends on how fast I can limp,” she joked.

“You make sure you bring that limp to the infirmary, Aurora. I’m serious.”

She knew he was, even if he was making sure to keep his tone on the lighter side, and she was certain he would ask her again as soon as she and Ginger showed up for dinner. Chances were low there was any treatment the doctors here could offer that would undo an amputation, but her dad was right. At the very least she needed to get these old bandages changed out for new ones and maybe some pain medicine to go with them. If Dr. Fetlock wanted to pull a speculum out of the freezer for her while she was there, it was his funeral.

“I’ll go right now,” she assured him, making her way back to the corridor with Weathers in tow. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

He lifted a feather and waved after her. “Bring an appetite. Love you, honey.”

“Love you too, dad.”

Aurora pointedly ignored the strange look Weathers gave her as they left Hydroponics behind, and the colonel mercifully kept her comments to herself. They paused at the stairwell to allow a trio of pegasi through, their eyes following the two undressed mares as their cheeks reddened. Her fellow residents drew the colonel’s curiosity as they mounted the steps, and when she asked the deputies behind her whether she had done something wrong, the two stallions clammed up with their own mumbled dismissals. Aurora laughed under her breath and pulled herself up with the railing, grateful that the infirmary was only one level up.

On its own, Medical took up roughly two-thirds of the space allotted to level three with the remainder dedicated to the Stable’s daycare. A sign posted next to the stairwell door notified residents that they were about to enter Medical - a gentle but necessary reminder to those new parents who had inadvertently taken the wrong stairwell in the hopes that they wouldn’t use the sterilized corridors as a shortcut. It worked sometimes, and only sometimes, much to the dismay of the fifty or so residents working here.

Dim lights greeted them as they had everywhere else. Aurora led Weathers into the carpeted beige waiting area where a fidgety white stallion regarded the packed seats with unmasked trepidation. For a split second Aurora felt like she was back at Autumn Song’s solar array with her diminutive secretary Quincy eyeing her with guarded interest. She shook off the memory and stepped through two short rows of chairs, one of which was occupied by a mare clutching her stomach in absolute misery, while the rest appeared to be filled by residents who all looked like they were waiting for somebody else. A few pegasi even loitered by the reception desk, murmuring among themselves while the nurse receptionist tried his best to ignore them.

When he looked up to see two more visitors headed toward him, his demeanor momentarily darkened with resignation. Aurora frowned back as she eyed the crowd, trying to decide for herself whether it would be better to just leave and avoid catching whatever bug had started going around since she left.

The nurse receptionist made the decision for her when he rose to meet her. “Oh, good. You got our message.”

“Miss Dressage, would you please sit down, yer makin’ me nervous.”

Ginger bit down on the urge to snap at the old biddy as she reached the end of the long viewing window, turned, and paced the way she came. Sledge and Opal had seated themselves in chairs provided by the medical staff, and a third remained for Ginger that she couldn’t bring herself to sit in. Every last nerve in her body was awash in a torrent of nervous energy. She looked toward the double doors at the end of the hall, her impatience rising alongside her frustration. Where was Aurora? The nurse said she would have someone go get her and that had been almost ten minutes ago.

She tipped her eyes toward the ceiling and tried to blink away anxious tears. Through the window they could all see Rainbow Dash lying on a gurney while multiple doctors stood around her in deep discussion, not one of them showing an ounce of initiative as they seemed too afraid to do anything. She reached the opposite end of the window and turned around to retrace her steps.

“Ginger,” Sledge urged her. “Come sit down.”

“They’re not doing anything.”

She’d been hammering at that point ever since several pegasi she didn’t know helped carry Rainbow down to the infirmary. Most of them were in the waiting room now, strangers suddenly roped into something they couldn’t disinvest themselves from any more than Ginger could. That had been less than a quarter hour ago.

“She’s breathin’, ain’t she?”

She shot a look at Opal. “Barely.”

Sledge pressed his lips together and sighed. “Because she’s a ghoul. Staring down the doctors won’t make them figure it out any faster.”

She was tempted to point out the doctors hadn’t so much as spared any of them a second glance since they all piled into the exam room. They had left the curtains open as a courtesy to the overstallion, but Ginger wanted to pull open the door and shout for them to just rip off the necklace. It was plain as day that it was doing something to Rainbow, but when Ginger had tried to pry the gem out of its socket with her magic it had been like touching her brain to a live wire. It had been her startled yelp that attracted the attention of the other residents and the brief disorienting pain had thoroughly deterred Ginger from picking Rainbow up with her magic.

She stared into the exam room, hating how helpless she felt. Rechargeable lanterns hung at either end of the room gave the illusion that the power was back on, chasing the doctors’ shadows into the corridor where they waited. She grit her teeth as one of them wrapped his feathers under Rainbow’s necklace and pulled, only to stop once he confirmed the jewelry was still locked into its inexplicable stasis as well as its bearer.

The doors at the end of the hall thumped open. She whirled around and breathed relief at the sight of Aurora, only for that feeling to be replaced with a simmering dread at the sight of Weathers following close behind. As she approached, Aurora looked to her, then Opal and Sledge with visible confusion.

“What’s going on? Did someone get hurt?”

Ginger braced herself for the inevitable as Aurora limped toward the viewing window and frowned at the scene inside. She had trusted her to calm Rainbow down and explicitly told her to be careful with her. At the time it had sounded more like a joke but now she couldn’t help but worry she’d missed the seriousness of such a simple statement. She should have waited before giving the element back to Rainbow. They should have discussed it with Sledge. He knew Rainbow better than anyone and may have spotted a red flag that she didn’t.

One of the first thoughts Aurora had upon learning Coldbrook had given the order to excavate the tunnel was to tell Sledge to get Rainbow Dash inside. She never once asked what Rainbow meant to Aurora or the pegasi who raised her. How angry would she be? How much trust in her was Aurora losing as she stared through that window?

“What happened?”

Ginger wasn’t sure where to begin. Luckily, Sledge stepped in to save her.

“They think she might’ve had something called an absence seizure,” he rumbled from his chair, noting the confused tilt of Aurora’s ear. “Don’t ask me what that means. Far as I can tell, this looks like how she gets right before Blue takes over.”

Colonel Weathers frowned at him. “Blue?”

Sledge pressed his lips shut, unwilling to answer.

Ginger scratched at the back of her foreleg, nervous. “It happened right after she took back her element. One second she’s putting it in its socket and the next thing I know all the lights are out and no one’s home. She just slumped over like…”

She stopped short of finishing. Aurora was looking at her now, face furrowed with deep concern.

“Are you okay?”

She fumbled a little, momentarily unsure if she’d been on tenterhooks waiting for something ridiculous to happen or if Aurora was only keeping her irritation hidden. Only when Aurora turned to face her more directly did she realize she was getting herself worked up over nothing. Aurora wasn’t angry. She was worried.

“I’m okay,” she murmured. “Just a little shocked by all this.”

She sensed Aurora’s relief and let go of some of the tension she’d been holding onto. Now that she was thinking more clearly, she could see the subtle signs that Aurora was in pain again. She lit her horn and nudged the underside of Aurora’s wing until she dutifully draped it over her back, taking some of the weight of her hind leg. With Sledge and Opal leaning into a private conversation behind them, they faced the window to watch the doctors scratch their heads.

“They think her element did that to her?”

“We don’t know yet. Sledge tried to go in to talk to one of them and they only had guesses.” She shook her head, watching as they struggled to draw blood from Rainbow’s foreleg. “Maybe something is wrong with the stone. When I tried to pull it off of her it shocked me.”

“Should they be touching it, then?”

One of the doctors had set his hooves against the gurney and wrapped his feathers around the necklace’s delicate scrollwork, pulling a little harder the longer he held on. He nearly kicked the gurney out from under Rainbow before his colleagues yelled at him to stop. It was surreal enough just to watch, as if the Element of Harmony was selectively rooting itself in three dimensions when it sensed it was being interfered with. As soon as the doctor let go, the golden plates resumed their gentle rise and fall in tune with Rainbow’s breathing.

“I think it responded to my magic,” she said, recalling how intensely it had rebuffed her attempt to dislodge it. “It’s doing something to her and I don’t think it wants to be interrupted.”

A deeper voice joined them. “If she’s the Element of Loyalty, that stone shouldn’t be capable of doing anything to her.”

Ginger frowned up at the colonel looming behind them. She’d nearly forgotten she was still here, enjoying her leisure time while the deputies tasked with watching her loitered uselessly halfway down the hall. She made a quiet noise of disgust for their transparent attempt to dump their assignment on them.

Weathers seemed to share the same sentiment, but it clearly bothered her less. “The Tree of Harmony burned with everything else when the bombs fell. Even if the stones were capable of working independently of their bearers, which they’re not, balefire would have burned off any magic it held generations ago.”

Ginger looked to Aurora, who gave the tiniest shake of her head. Weathers didn’t have the full story, and neither of them were looking for an excuse to clue her in.

“Maybe the Tree survived.” Aurora posited.

“The crater where it grew suggests otherwise.” Weathers shuffled her wings in irritation. “I want to speak to her when she wakes up.”

“If she wakes up,” Ginger muttered.

Weathers stepped toward the window, her face grim. “If she’s an Element of Harmony, she will.”

The words fell from her mouth like stones. Ginger couldn’t help but feel a deep, familiar sense of discomfort being this close to someone still tied to the Enclave’s teachings. The fanaticism preached in the Chapel of the Two Sisters didn’t just create followers devoted to the renewal of a golden era; it reinforced a system of knee-jerk hostility toward anyone who might suggest those teachings were imperfect. Rainbow Dash, as she existed now, represented that imperfection to the letter. To devoted followers like Weathers, unicorns were a fallen caste responsible for the very balefire that immolated the Equestrian utopia, and the fact that some of them used the smallest shimmer of magic left after the destruction was widely regarded as a minor sin. It didn’t take a scholar to tell that Weathers blamed what was happening now on Ginger’s supposedly tainted magic. She could talk sense to Weathers until she was blue in the face and the colonel would never listen.

Behind them, Sledge spoke up. “What do you need to speak to her about?”

Unsurprisingly, Weathers was more receptive to an inquiry from a fellow pegasi.

“It’s a private matter.”

Or not.

Sledge leaned forward. His chair creaked. “Would this private matter have anything to do with Rainbow Dash calling you a traitor?”

The colonel didn’t invoke her status or hide behind her uniform to shut him down. That alone was strange behavior for someone of her status. She stared at Sledge, seemingly prepared for the accusation. Then she turned back to the window, watching the doctors move away from Rainbow’s bed to confer. “It’s not every day you meet your foalhood hero. Less often that they call you their enemy. I still don’t understand what I did to make her so angry.”

Sledge tapped his hoof on the floor and sighed. His expression grew stony as he looked at the three of them. “She has her reasons.”

Ginger traded glances with Aurora and felt a strange comfort knowing she appeared just as confused as she was.

Weathers half-turned to face Sledge with renewed interest. “I’m listening.”

He shook his head, looking past them for a moment as if to convince himself that Rainbow was still in her trance. “Not here. This isn’t something I want the Stable finding out about. Not until things settle down first.”

Aurora frowned. “Sledge, what’re you talking about?”

He ignored her and turned to Opal who had taken to looking down at the floor, her eyes troubled. “Do you mind staying here in case the doctors have an update?”

She shot him a disquieted look as if she were ready to argue, but then she just shrugged. “Go ahead. But if yer gonna show ‘em, show ‘em everything.”

The overstallion led the three of them back upstairs where the crowded Atrium had since thinned out to a few kitchen staff and the wingful of residents passing the time on the benches surrounding the two large planters at either side of the communal space. The power may be out but their Pip-Bucks glowed without complaint, powered by miniaturized versions of the talismans that the Steel Rangers hoarded for their armored suits.

Weathers followed behind Aurora and her unicorn mate, idly observing the dim glow of the emergency lights while feeling the relief that Spitfire’s chosen pegasi weren’t making the decision that Stable 85 had. Their Stable had encountered a similar problem as this one, though their generator’s failure had been caused by simple neglect and nothing to do with its talisman. A catastrophic mechanical failure had resulted in their generator tearing a large section of itself to pieces, killing several workers in the process. Repairs couldn’t be done without power, and power couldn’t be restored without repairs. It was a case of a snake eating its own tail, and according to what were now well-studied transcripts from the time, a potential solution was floated by a low level Pip-Buck technician and its popularity gained immediate traction with the rest of the population.

Not two days after the first mention of harvesting the M.A.S.T. talismans out of the Pip-Bucks were the ponies of Mechanical putting it into practice. Residents reportedly lined up to donate their Pip-Bucks, believing with enough talismans wired together in series they could generate enough electricity to repair their generator and save their Stable. Most Enclave scholars agreed that the makeshift battery they created held five to six hundred talismans in total, though the number was rumored to be higher than that. Unbeknownst to the residents of Stable 85, they hadn’t created a battery. They’d effectively made a bomb.

When the Enclave got word that 85 had gone offline and teams were sent to recover its tech, they found the lower third of the Stable a charred void. The shockwave of the explosion had momentarily pressurized the sealed shelter, killing its population in a matter of seconds. While the loss of life had been tragic, it was regarded by many as one of the more merciful ends some Stables had experienced. They’d all gone not knowing their Stable had been doomed from the beginning, dying just forty years shy of the date Stable-Tec had planned to gradually pump hallucinogens into the overseer’s office.

Probably not a story she should share as they filed inside Sledge’s office at the top of the Atrium. From what she’d seen so far of Stable 10, which wasn’t much, she could see the obvious signs of a community that had their shit together. Judging by the way Sledge carried himself, he was either very new to leadership in general or just new to his role as overstallion. Still, the corridors remained clear for the most part and the pegasi roaming the halls appeared more inconvenienced than afraid. It remained to be seen how long that would last when word spread about Rainbow Dash’s incapacitation.

Weathers frowned a little as Sledge turned his terminal to where they had gathered around the side of his desk. A large part of her refused to believe the ghoul in the infirmary could be Rainbow Dash. Cutie marks could be faked. Manes could be dyed. Ghouls were not in short supply in Equestria, despite the Enclave’s best efforts to correct that problem within their own territory. The Rangers’ grumbling tolerance of ghouls within their territory was the root of the problem. And yet no one around Weathers appeared to be acting. Watching the doctors fail to remove the necklace from the ghoul’s neck as if it were locked in place had been unsettling in how convincing their concern was. At least some of them, it appeared, believed she was the genuine article. A ministry mare and folk hero whom everyone assumed died when a zebra missile detonated in Fillydelphia had apparently been trapped in a pocket of tunnel when the bombs triggered a landslide.

The odds of it happening at all were extraordinarily slim. The Enclave had records of Rainbow Dash’s schedule on that last day and all evidence pointed to her arriving at Stable-Tec Headquarters as expected. To cross the distance between there and Stable 10 during the apex of Vhanna’s attack and survive? Weathers doubted she could sell those odds to the gamblers of New Las Pegasus, let alone anyone with half a sense of how impossible that flight would have been. It hardly bore thinking about.

And yet…

“...do I have your word on that?”

Weathers blinked, suddenly aware Sledge was speaking to her. She chastised herself for allowing herself to daydream and tried not to look as annoyed as she suddenly felt. “I’m sorry, say that again?”

For his part, he kept his composure well. “I want your word that you will not share with your people what I’m about to show you. Not until our generator is repaired and our door is locked.”

The terminal was on now. Its screen glowed with a short list of files evidently meant to be opened in order. None of the file names gave her any clue to what might be on them. She didn’t appreciate being asked to agree to blind terms, either.

Sensing her hesitation, Sledge added, “You want to know why Rainbow called you a traitor today. Your answer is here.”

He was right. If the mare who accosted her was the true Element of Loyalty, then her career could rest on knowing why Rainbow accused her of disloyalty. If whatever Sledge planned to show her ended up being a hoax or a collection of loosely interpreted pre-war propaganda, she could safely consider his deal to be made in bad faith and would lose no sleep over informing Minister Primrose of her findings.

“You have my word.”

Unless he planned on hooking her up to a lie detector he had no way of knowing whether she could be trusted or not, and he certainly knew it too. He’d committed himself by bringing her here. What would be the point if he backed out now?

As expected, he nodded with a grunt and leaned toward the terminal keyboard. Weathers couldn’t help but feel she was looming over them as Ginger helped Aurora into one of the guest chairs, the three of them finding seats while she remained standing. She chose not to comment and watched the terminal screen flicker as a grainy video began to play.

Weathers watched the first moments play out with confusion, then curiosity, and finally with growing concern. It took her several seconds to recognize the tunnel from the camera’s high vantage point. It took her longer to notice the significance of the timestamp in the corner. October 31st, 1077. No matter who you were or which corner of the wasteland you were born in, you knew the date. It was inescapable even now, two hundred and twenty years later.

Unbeknownst to Weathers, Sledge presented her the same footage he’d witnessed alone in this very office just two weeks prior. The same moments in history that Spitfire had sought to erase. The room grew quiet as the soundless panic of evacuees piled up against the closed door. Wings beat against each other as pegasi tread air, their faces white with fear as the video shook with the reverberations of approaching detonations. The slow understanding that this wasn’t a place they would escape. And among them, a middle-aged blue mare with rainbows in her mane battered her hooves against the door in abject despair.

The video shuddered, dust fell from the ceiling, and the collected heads of those gathered at the door turned to the tunnel entrance with a unified, silent scream.

Against protocol for an officer in uniform, Weathers found herself sitting down on the scuffed floor. Sledge skipped the video forward in time. A mass suicide of the trapped evacuees hurried through stages of decay until the only movement was that of two survivors. She didn’t need to be told who the blue mare was, but Sledge pointed Rainbow Dash out anyway. She was accompanied by a changeling, undisguised. A friend. No, more than that. A caretaker. She’d barely reconciled the ramifications of something so unheard of when the video ended.

Sledge asked her something but she held up a striated feather and shook her head. Later.

He answered questions from Aurora and Ginger. The two sounded more affected than Weathers felt, but she knew what this numbness usually meant. Soon Sledge was opening the next file. Another video taken from the interior of a machine she didn’t recognize. It felt out of place, but she watched as the ponies inside chatted to one another with the same familiar eagerness her enlisted soldiers showed before a critical mission. That nervous excitement bubbled out of their professional banter even as the video began to shudder like it had in the tunnel. She began to key into the unfamiliar terminology and realized she was witnessing the launch of one of Equestria’s rockets. The video came from the helmet of one of its flight crew, evidenced as she reached out with a sleeved hoof that somehow sprouted fingers like a gryphon. What was the point of watching this? What did it have to do with Rainbow Dash being trapped in the tunnel?

They reached orbit, then ascended further. They were approaching a satellite, one of them said, and Weathers watched as one of the screens above the spacefarer’s helmet identified their target by its formal name.

SOLUS.

The hairs on her neck stood up. Aurora and Ginger sat up a little straighter as they stole quick glances in her direction, but it was Sledge who appeared ready to be sick. Weathers looked to him occasionally, his discomfort growing more apparent as the ship docked with the lost weapon and the footage followed the mare out into the void of space. Something was about to happen. She could see it in the way the overstallion focused every ounce of his attention on the screen. They watched the mare walk along SOLUS’s skin, pausing to place talismans into chambers around its circumference. Power sources, she realized. Somewhere up there, SOLUS had been given power.

Then, trouble. A fight had broken out on the ship. Flashes. The spacefarer, now abandoned, watched pinpricks of green light blooming across Equestria’s western seaboard. It occurred to Weathers what she was seeing and found herself holding her breath. She’d seen hundreds of craters. Flown through the ruins of countless cities. Walked the solemn trail through the forest which grew around the fallen wreckage of Cloudsdale. She’d seen what the balefire bombs had left in their wake, but never once had she seen footage of them explode.

She took a slow, unsteady breath. Not until now.

They popped like ugly, green blisters in a slow, merciless procession from one shore to the other. Her attention shifted to the east coast and she realized, with sufficient speed, a pegasus could reasonably beat the advancing wall of death to Foal Mountain. Barely, but it was possible. And Rainbow Dash was not known for leisure flights.

As the accented voice of a terrified Vhannan spilled over the radio, begging anyone who could hear him not to retaliate, Weathers realized it was possible she could have made the journey. According to the footage she was seeing now, Rainbow had.

Sledge reached over and stopped the video. On the screen, the entire Equestrian landmass had been reduced to a fresh apocalypse of blackened, green-glowing wreckage with bombs still exploding far north and south. The zebras hadn’t been satisfied to kill Equestria. They’d taken the Crystal Empire and the Badland tribes with them.

“Those weren’t Vhannan bombs,” Sledge murmured. “They were ours.”

Hearing something impossible being said with such conviction caught her completely off guard. If she hadn’t been so humbled by what she’d just witnessed she might have laughed, but as she was now she merely regarded him in the same way she might stare at a soldier trying to chamber a shotgun shell into a pistol.

He seemed unfazed by her disbelief. “Rainbow Dash said as much herself. Vhanna never developed the technology required to manufacture balefire bombs, and even if one had been smuggled to them, it would have been one. Not hundreds. Every single missile Equestria built was programmed to detonate over an Equestrian target.”

She could feel herself behind corralled toward an obvious question. “Then who destroyed the Vhannan continent?”

Her answer came when he resumed the video. She braced herself for what came next. Beneath the abandoned mare’s hooves, SOLUS groaned to life. Puffs of mist pointed the bottom of the satellite toward the glittering, night-lit zebra cities like the barrel of a loaded gun. Prongs not dissimilar from the focal blades of a plasma rifle aligned themselves toward one such city. They glowed a sickly green.

A torrent of balefire erupted from SOLUS and bore into the center of those lights, extinguishing them and the lives of those near the explosion that surged up from the point of impact. Her back went rigid as nearby cities went dark ahead of the fiery shockwave. The young mare screamed as her suit charred but the machine didn’t hear her as it targeted the next city, and the next.

And Weathers understood the fiction she had been told. Those vast, meandering black canyons that cracked the Vhannan countryside weren’t evidence of the strength of Equestria’s retaliation. They were worse than that. They were evidence of something dishonorable. Something so patently criminal that nothing short of the evisceration of a civilization could hide the truth of what had happened.

Tears welled in her eyes as she began to understand. The ministries controlled the bombs. The ministries pushed to continue the war.

Her voice shook when she spoke.

“Which one of them ordered the attack.”

But as Sledge pressed his lips into a narrow line and leaned over to play the next video, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she didn’t understand it all. Not yet.

The screen blinked to life again. She watched Spitfire, the founder and first commander of the Enclave, enter the office of a bedraggled mare she did not recognize. The nameplate on her desk read simply: Delta Vee.

Time passed.

The last seconds of footage wound out and the terminal screen went dark again. An uncomfortable silence settled between the four of them as it became evident the well-worn tale of Equestria’s violent end was merely a series of lies strung into a comfortable narrative. Tradition, honor, authority. Three pillars the Enclave had been built upon. A powerful fiction woven by just two mares.

Thoughts rioted in Weathers’ head as she tried to reconcile what she believed with what she just witnessed. The ghoul in the infirmary was what remained of Rainbow Dash. There was little she could do to deny that fact. She’d witnessed Rainbow’s decay. She watched her foalhood champion batter herself senseless against a cold and uncaring barrier, surrounded by corpses of the families who once idolized her. She had survived the ultimate betrayal only to slowly lose herself to the painful progression of ghouling.

Yet she remembered. She knew who had done this to her. Two hundred and ten years later, in the Atrium of the Stable that locked her out, Rainbow looked up at her and called her a monster.

She closed her eyes and tried to stave off the uncomfortable sense of not being present in her own body. Nothing felt real. If Primrose really had been instrumental in the end of the old world, that meant the entire core the Enclave had been predicated upon was built around a lie.

Her throat had gone tacky. She swallowed. Maybe the footage from Spitfire’s office was faked. It was possible, but something tugged at her heart that said it wasn’t. These were Stable-dwellers, not pre-war propagandists. They wouldn’t have known Primrose’s name up until a week ago, let alone the sound of her voice. No, the phone calls between Primrose and Spitfire were as real as the rest of it. And yet none of it answered the one question plaguing her.

Why?

“Colonel?”

She blinked up at the overstallion and realized, too late, that her mask had fallen away. She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I need to go someplace where I can think.”

Sledge gestured a feather toward Ginger and Aurora, then at the office itself. “You have six ears right here you can bend.”

She wasn’t the only one struggling to process what they’d seen, though the two mares seated across the desk at least enjoyed the luxury of not having to review the last several decades of their lives. Of course, they had questions. Questions for her. If ever she didn’t feel up for a debriefing it was right now. She stood up, careful to avoid their expectant gazes. “I’d prefer to be alone.”

As she turned to leave, she silently wished she could turn back the clock to an hour ago when her world made sense. She’d been excited for the opportunity to lead the assault on the Rangers dug into the partially excavated tunnel. A short list of names still sat in the pocket of her uniform; soldiers she’d been looking forward to recommending for commendation, all but one still standing in the aftermath. Now all of that felt tainted. Stained now that the curtain had been pulled away.

She stopped at the door and shut her eyes for a moment, willing herself to keep the rising emotion out of her voice. “Would one of you please open the door?”

A few frustrating seconds ticked by before a chair scraped and a small set of hooves trotted over. She flinched a little when Ginger appeared beside her, the mare’s horn wrapped in a blob of amber light. Magic grasped the bottom of the door and heaved it off the floor, startling the two deputies posted on the other side.

As she held the steel slab aloft, Ginger spoke softly. “Please don’t say or do anything to jeopardize this Stable.”

It wasn’t an idle request. Weathers met the unicorn’s eyes and saw the very real threat just beneath the surface. With several tons of steel floating on a thin aura above their heads, Ginger was demonstrating the danger Weathers would be in if she said anything to interfere with the upcoming delivery of Stable 10’s ignition talisman. This place was Ginger’s future as much as any other pegasus who lived here. Behind that cordial smile, she was warning Weathers that she would do what was necessary to protect it.

She admitted a grudging respect for the mare’s tenacity. She nodded, once, and stepped through the doorway without a word. As the deputies led her back to the security office and the promise of an empty cell, the door slammed shut behind her like a grenade. It took a force of will to pretend for the deputies that the encounter hadn’t unsettled her. In issuing her warning, Ginger had answered the question Sledge’s footage couldn’t.

Primrose didn’t end the world so she could live underground and enjoy the first pick of the Enclave’s least mutated carrots. If power had been her sole motivation, a mare with her cunning would have found a way to preserve the best of the old world and rule it in unrivaled luxury. No, the reason was obvious. It had nothing to do with a desire to rule. It was why she hadn’t stopped with Equestria and elected instead to turn SOLUS on the Vhannan continent. The immolation of Equestria wasn’t the finish line. It was a checkpoint. A necessary sacrifice on the path to erase an even greater force, the absence of which was what made a mere pegasi’s unchallenged authority possible.

Her target had been magic.

Clearly, it was making a comeback.

Aurora waited until Ginger had shown Weathers out before releasing the tension that had built up in her chest. She exhaled and shook her head at the ceiling. “Was it really necessary to bring her to show-and-tell?”

Ginger returned to her chair with annoyance on her face. Sledge grunted. “The past is easier to prove if she sees it for herself.”

She scoffed at that. “Who said we owed her an explanation in the first place?”

Sitting behind his desk, he looked at her like one of her foalhood teachers used to when she was too young to know she was asking an obvious question. She turned her hooves up and stared back at him. “What? Weathers is only here as insurance to make sure that standing army of hers behaves. We don’t owe her anything. And this…” She gestured at his terminal. “That was a lot to just give away for free. What happens when it’s time to let her go?”

Ginger nodded. “That’s my concern as well. The Enclave is an established institution with tens of thousands of members prepared to defend it. If we send her out there and she reports back to Primrose what we know, Weathers will be executed and the Enclave will regard this Stable as a threat.”

“Again,” Aurora emphasized.

Sledge watched them in silence, absorbing everything they said and reacting to none of it. A tremble of annoyance ran up her neck when she recognized the tells in his concrete posture. He was pulling the same stonewalling shit he used when he thought someone less experienced or qualified was telling him how to run Mechanical. He was listening as much as he was waiting for them to be quiet so he could change the subject. As if to confirm her suspicion, his eyes slid toward her as soon as he noticed her jaw tightening.

She took a slow breath, refusing to give him that foothold. “Look. What’s done is done, but as soon as this is over you need to turn this Stable upside down until you’re one hundred percent sure there aren’t any other vulnerabilities lying around that Primrose can exploit.”

“Or create,” Ginger said, looking down at the Pip-Buck the Enclave had given her.

Aurora privately wished they could take the thing off now. If the thermite charge embedded within its slim circuitry triggered early, it had the potential to sever Ginger’s hoof as cleanly as the Enclave’s surgeons had removed Aurora’s leg. Given what they knew Primrose was capable of, keeping the truth of what they knew a secret was all the more critical.

“She won’t flip like Julip did,” Ginger continued. “Weathers is a high ranking officer. She’s been eating, drinking, and teaching the Enclave’s lies for her entire adult life. She won’t throw all that away over some vintage security footage and a recorded phone call.”

Aurora shrugged her wings in agreement. “You should have run this by us first.”

A faint incredulous frown flickered across Sledge’s face and was gone just as quickly. Half a month ago he wouldn’t have hesitated to light into her with his endlessly colorful vocabulary, which was why seeing him holding back now surprised her. He was the speak first apologize later sort of stallion, and about as diplomatic as the maul he was named for.

“Aurora,” he began, his gray eyes settling on her like two pin punches lining themselves up to a piece of iron, “I don’t want you to think anything I’m about to say is meant to lessen the sacrifices you and your friends made for us. I doubt we’ll ever be able to properly repay you. That being said, Overmare Delphi placed the responsibility of this Stable on my shoulders before she died. She chose me for this. Not you.”

She shifted uneasily in her seat, remembering that horrible pop that rang through the Atrium while she had been preparing to leave the Stable. Sledge appeared to be reliving the same moment. He hadn’t been shielded from seeing the immediate aftermath like the rest of the Stable. He was standing in this office, speaking to them while Delphi sat behind her desk and quietly slipped the barrel of Desperate Times into her mouth and pressed the trigger. Aurora wondered whether he’d had anyone to talk to about it, or if he was just as adept as she’d been at packing away the traumas life seemed happy to throw her way.

He composed himself and continued. “I don’t know much more about the Enclave than what you two told me, but anyone with eyes could tell that being called a traitor by Rainbow was eating at her. Weathers was going to keep pulling at that thread until someone gave her an answer, and then she was going to demand proof. Like you say, she has a standing army outside. I don’t want to risk her using it against us if she suspects we’re down here brainwashing the only Element of Harmony they seem to give a shit about.”

She looked to Ginger who returned her expression with a conceding nod. Sledge had been thinking well ahead of either of them.

To his credit, he passed up the opportunity to rub their noses in it. “The way I understand things, you’ve talked to Primrose more than enough times already to assure her that you didn’t know anything you shouldn’t. As far as she can see, her attempt to kill Spitfire put enough fear into her and Delta that they buried everything they found. Her problem solved itself, so the reasonable action to take now is to cast herself as our benevolent savior and quash any lingering suspicions in the process.” He dropped several red feathers over the top of his terminal and shrugged. “Colonel Weathers is going to poke a hole in Primrose’s bubble as soon as she mentions Rainbow Dash is alive, and by the time that happens there will be six feet of tungsten steel alloy standing between us and them. The best move was to tell Weathers everything so when she leaves, her boss can’t be sure which of her soldiers knows the truth and which don’t. Easier to address it publicly and spin it to make her look good than to cull hundreds.

“Once she starts lying,” he said, looking satisfied with himself, “she’s stuck. Her whole reputation will be tied to our continued health and happiness. Anyone caught so much as scuffing the door will throw her narrative into doubt. She’ll have no choice but to protect us.”

It was a lot to take in, but when Aurora looked to Ginger for signs of doubt she could tell the two of them were thinking the same thing. Sledge hit the nail square on the head. It was a little disturbing how sound his logic was considering he only had a passing understanding of how the Enclave worked. Delphi had chosen well when she appointed him overstallion.

Ginger was the first to speak. “I wish I’d thought to consult with you prior to bargaining with her yesterday. We might have negotiated more than one talisman.”

He did his best to wave off her compliment by leveling an accusatory feather at Aurora. “Chalk it up to years of working in the same room as this one. She’s good for a headache if you make the mistake of forgetting anything.”

She couldn’t suppress a smirk from curling her lip. “It’s one of my endearing features.”

He smiled back. “If you say so. To be honest, you’re taking all of this a lot better than I thought you would.”

She didn’t have an immediate answer for that. Compared to what she’d been through - being shot, overpowered, irradiated, nearly torn to pieces by mutants, tortured by a different kind of monster, and waking up with a stump for a leg - learning the truth behind the end of the world barely ranked higher than a footnote. She took a moment to boil that sentiment down into something palatable.

“Mom liked to say one of the worst things we can do is resent what we have when it’s everything we need.” She glanced at Ginger and set a hoof atop hers. “I’m not happy knowing what really happened, but I’m not going to ruin my life dwelling on something I can’t change when I have a future to look forward to.”

Sledge stared at her for a long moment. “Who are you and what have you done with the stubborn mule I taught to swing a hammer?”

She snorted. “Dick.”

“There she is.” He rose from his seat, pausing to roll a kink out of his shoulder. “Now’s as good a time as any to make a circuit of the Stable, I think. People are going to want to know what happened to Rainbow. Any chance I can bribe you two into coming along?”

For once in her life, Aurora had a built-in excuse to get out of work. She lifted her bandaged stump and tried to pretend she was fine with the absence of an entire limb. Maybe someday it might actually feel normal. “We would, but I still need one of the docs to look at this weird growth.”

Sledge did an admirable job at hiding his discomfort as she dropped from her chair. Ginger was beside her before she got a second hoof on the ground, ready to take some of her weight if she needed it. Minor as it felt, Aurora felt a touch of pride at managing it without help.

“Then do me a favor when you get there and tell Opal she can head back up to IT. I’ll stop by her office on my way through so we can trade notes.”

Ginger hefted the door out of the way and they followed Sledge out to the Atrium where a quartet of young pegasi were taking advantage of the empty space by taking turns racing each other from one wall to the other. The sound of galloping hooves and belted laughter echoed in the dimly lit space and they paused along the railing to watch.

Sledge nudged her and pointed her toward two stallions chatting as they watched from a bench beside a shuttered arcade. One wore a neatly pressed jumpsuit, same as everyone else. The other, a chalk-white pegasus with a smudge of pink painting his snout, wore nothing besides a nervous smile and a pink lily on his hip. She started to smile too as she realized how rare it was to see a fellow resident’s mark. It was beautiful. She looked at Sledge, grinning.

“In case you didn’t know you’re a bad influence.” He surprised her by chuckling as he left to do his rounds, leaving her wondering just how much her Stable had changed.

Rainbow dreamed while the element performed its work.

It seemed like minutes had passed. The distant, locking ache she felt told her differently.

Everything shuttered through her mind like a chattering roll of film through a projector. Flashes and images and scenes and sounds she’d experienced so long ago, lifetimes ago, that she had no business recalling them in such vivid clarity.

Her foalhood bedroom decorated with toys and sculpted in fine clouds. Her boppy, a stuffed cardinal who gave her comfort when the night came and which would find its way into a cardboard box years later never to be seen again. Groggy breakfasts spent looking at the backs of cereal boxes, lunches in the school cafeteria, dinners with mom and dad. The excitement of being told yes that she could go to Junior Speedsters Flight Camp and the quiet apprehension of being away from home for two whole weeks. Equestria’s first recorded sonic rainboom whose effects seemed to follow her for the rest of her life.

Her first apartment. Fights with neighbors. A messy eviction she painted over with her friends and family as a proactive decision to move to Ponyville. She remembered the stress of living paycheck to paycheck as a weather pony, perpetually terrified of how far behind bills one bad landing could put her all while putting on the bravest face she could muster. She lived like that for years, breaking up clouds all day and sleeping on a hand-me-down mattress.

No one knew who she was. Not until the millennium anniversary of the Summer Sun Celebration arrived and Nightmare Moon came with it. Before she knew it, she found herself roped in with five mares she barely knew and woke up the next day branded an Element of Harmony. She assumed the title was honorary at first and maybe help put her on the Wonderbolts’ radar, but it quickly became a full-time job of being rounded up by Twilight for one royal assignment or the other, some which took days to complete and left the six of them battered and bruised. But the pay was good, the friends better, and she remembered how the longer she stuck around the more she felt the work she was doing gave her a sense of worth.

Memories swept her along like a flooded river. Discord, Chrysalis. One entity who appeared to show a willingness to change himself and another who fled to her hive before an offer could be made. She never fully understood who Sombra had been. Twilight ensured they never had the chance to talk sense into Tirek. Every creature they encountered capable of wielding power like theirs chipped away their weaknesses and filled the gaps with inner strengths they didn’t know they had. Except for Twilight. They’d all seen her frustration build, her nerves fray a little more each time, and the pressure of assuming yet another mantle of responsibility after Celestia’s gift of wings only strained her more.

The wet crunch of Tirek’s skull caving under the might of her magic had branded itself into Rainbow’s mind. A single moment of unrestrained anger and a living, thinking creature was reduced to meat and bone. Without considering their thoughts on what the story of Tirek’s defeat should be, they watched helplessly as Twilight teleported herself and the centaur’s corpse to the steps of Canterlot Castle. Her emotionless pose beside his corpse ran with the next day’s papers along with a warning to any creatures tempted to walk the same road he had.

Discord was sealed once again for his part in helping Tirek, his efforts to reform forgotten. She recalled waking up in her condo the morning after, frying two eggs in the late morning light, and doubting her resolve to keep carrying on as an Element. Weeks passed. The odd assignments from Celestia kept trickling in, sending them to corners of the world that were quickly becoming familiar, and slowly her doubts faded. Tirek’s death had been a blip, she told herself. Weeks turned into years and no new villains appeared. She and the girls reluctantly agreed Twilight’s gambit had worked.

Equestria thrived. She remembered opening the mailbox and finding an acceptance letter from the Wonderbolts waiting for her. The girls were nothing but supportive, having already begun exploring their own personal and professional endeavors. For a time it felt as if she’d found the next step in her life. Early rises and late nights, the moments between a steady march of drills, training, and ceremony. A moment came when she fell into her bunk, exhausted, and realized none of the pegasi passing out around her expected anything of her but to sleep. No one had dropped from the sky and thrown a uniform and a set of obligations on her. She’d earned this.

The world changed not long after that. She received a letter sent from her parents, the words printed rather than written. The Wonderbolts started offering training routes for radio repair technicians and electricians. She woke up one morning to find half the new recruits gathered around a television mounted to the corner of the mess hall and practically had to beat them away from the screen with a stick. Suddenly the transistor was everywhere and those who clung to the old ways were seen as lesser. Modernization was branded synonymous with Equestrian. Already barrelling toward her forties, she remembered the first article she read criticizing Vhanna for stealing Equestrian innovations. It felt like an innocuous jab at the time. Zecora still had family in Vhanna, so it made little sense to Rainbow that they should be shunned for improving their own lives. She folded up the paper and left it in a stack by the door for Fluttershy to pick up for her birds.

She witnessed herself do like so many others did and gradually embrace the technological wonders around her. She bought a radio of her own, then a television. A sponsor deal Twilight set up with CoolCo brought Rainbow and the others their first refrigerators. Applejack bought her brother a gasoline-powered carriage for the farm and Rainbow watched as the dusty dirt roads she cheated off when navigating the sky were paved in concrete ribbon. She sat down with the girls for dinner during that long, peaceful decade and admitted things were different, but different was turning out to be okay. They’d toasted to that, unaware of what waited around the corner.

The ministries. The war. The failure of the Elements to activate against the Vhannan home defense and the Wonderbolts being torn to shreds in the space of less than an hour by a weapons system none of them expected from the lowly zebras. Spitfire had been forced into early retirement by Celestia. Rainbow took her in. Gave her a role to play which only made her betrayal cut deeper. She remembered tuning out during ministry meetings. Participating only when necessary, and only to regurgitate the lines Spitfire fed her.

She found Applejack, something they agreed they should have done much sooner. She confided in her. Told her what Spitfire was doing and made her promise not to tell anyone. Applejack confessed to confronting Spitfire in her office a few days later and tried to assure her things would be better from then on. Nothing did. They never realized how deeply Spitfire’s rot extended. How her shadow infiltrated the six ministries, finding loyalty in those exhausted with the long march of endless war. Applejack would never know standing up to Spitfire was the reason she and Rainbow were separated by hundreds of miles when the missiles rode white pillars into a clear blue sky. Now, drowning in memory, Rainbow understood it had been their punishment.

She remembered being trapped in the tunnel, the smell of death and radiation thick with every breath she took. She lived those long decades all over again, feeling a part of herself sliding out of phase as the years and desperation took their toll. But instead of blank stretches where Blue took control, she remembered it all. The wandering, mumbling hours of time wasted wandering from the rockslide to the door and back again, never quite sure why and never willing to stop. She experienced herself beating her hooves against the steel barrier until blood spattered the door and Roach came to distract her with songs and stories. Memories locked away behind Blue’s jibbering mind engulfed her like a tide. She heard Roach sing about love and sadness, and tell her stories of his family and helping fellow refugee changelings find their place in Equestria. He told her about his first experience watching something he planted himself grow in a pot on his kitchen windowsill and feeling something he strongly believed to be akin to what ponies felt when they found a purpose worthy of a mark. She remembered in a rare moment of lucidity waking with her head in his lap as he hummed a lullaby to her, and knowing with perfect clarity that she loved him.

Her heart broke a second time as she heard the Stable door open and close, depositing a single pegasus into the tunnel. Blue couldn’t articulate her outrage beyond screaming it in the terrified mare’s face. Were it not for Roach she would have killed Aurora.

And then Sledge was there to take his place, doing what he could to keep her calm, to do what he could as he worked out how Blue was wired. She listened to him whisper to her that he didn’t want to be in charge anymore. That he didn’t think he was as strong as everyone thought he was. She felt him shaking as he wept, thinking she wouldn’t remember, and quickly composed himself when the deputies would check in during their rounds.

It piled into her mind with perfect, terrible clarity.

And then she woke up.

Rainbow gasped like a drowning swimmer pulling herself above the surface, a tumble of flailing legs and sucking breath. Eyes wide and heart pounding, she found herself in an unfamiliar room on an unfamiliar bed with sterile white sheets kicked down around her hind legs from her momentary panic.

She sat there, motionless for several seconds as she pieced together where she was. Medical equipment, their screens dark, sat unused on a cart beside her bed. A countertop neatly stocked with medical tools still in their sterile wrappers loomed to her right. A clipboard rested on the edge nearest her and when she squinted at it she recognized her name at the top written in wide, looping letters. She grimaced as she sat herself up, not needing to scan the rest of the room to know where she’d been taken. She’d been lucky not to have too many memories of waking up in a hospital bed, but the ones she did have stuck with her.

She lifted a hoof, then the other before spotting the IV taped over an atrophied vein. When she tried to sit up a bit more she felt a familiar pinch and stopped moving. Using her wing to pull the sheets away uncovered a clear tube secured to the inside of her thigh, the end of which snaked inside her. She looked around for a nurse’s button only to remember that the power was out. The needle she could remove on her own, but there was no way in Tartarus she was extracting a catheter. Absolutely not.

Not that she appeared to have needed it. The tubing was bone dry.

So she waited. It didn’t take long for someone to come by and notice with alarm she was upright and awake. Even less time passed before the room was buzzing with white jackets, each rotating to the next like a gatling gun loaded with questions rather than bullets. They asked if she felt dizzy, nauseated, hungry, thirsty, hot or cold. The catheter was removed and a bedpan was ominously placed on a nearby counter just in case. She didn’t appreciate the insinuation that she might piss the bed, but she managed to keep her mouth shut on that front.

She did her best to answer their questions even if her responses were less than helpful. No, she didn’t have a history of epilepsy. Yes, she’d eaten and drank since arriving. No, she didn’t feel weak. No, her element wasn’t dangerous. Yes, it had caused her to black out in the past. No, she didn’t think it would happen again. Yes, she was certain. No, she didn’t want to explain how she knew. They took their measurements, drew what little dark, viscous blood her body was willing to relinquish, and then one by one they wandered back to their offices to puzzle over what they were looking at. A single nurse remained long enough to advise her to stay in bed before she herself disappeared to do whatever task was next on her list.

She waited ten minutes before getting bored.

So she got up and went for a walk.

The stainless steel bed of Colonel Weathers’ cell felt cool against her back and in a strange way made her feel a little more grounded in a world bent on making as little sense to her as it could. She rolled her head from one shoulder to the other, tracing the lines of the Stable’s ceiling as she pondered.

Her assigned guard, a comparatively young deputy named Stratus, shuddered audibly at the crackle of her neck. He wasn’t much of a guard. To be fair, this wasn’t much of a cell. The locks were simplistic even by old world standards and the door sat open for her to come and go as she pleased. She wasn’t a prisoner any more than this was a prison. The pegasi here just couldn’t be bothered to put her up in a real room. Fair enough. She didn’t need the subtext spelled out.

She crossed her hind hooves and blinked momentarily toward Stratus, hunched over lamplit paperwork of some kind, then back up at the ceiling.

The impulsive half of her wanted to be furious. To tear off her uniform, throw her patches across the room, and swear off the oath she’d taken over two decades ago. She wanted to let herself feel betrayed and, more than that, tell the officers and soldiers waiting for her outside what she knew so she could have someone to share that anger with. According to the videos Overstallion Sledge showed her, her minister had played an incriminating role in the death of the world she urged the rest of her Enclave to yearn for. Primrose had not only stolen the launch access of the Element of Laughter, but she’d coordinated with or possibly coerced Spitfire into doing the same. It was no secret among the upper echelon that relocating SOLUS was high on Primrose’s list of goals and if the footage she’d seen was real, then it meant the satellite wasn’t the untouchable power source she espoused it to be. It was death to whomever didn’t control it. Equestria had suffered immensely under the bombardment of its own balefire-tipped missiles, but Vhanna…

She squeezed her eyes shut before the tears could sting them.

What she watched happen to Vhanna aligned too perfectly with the tormented stories her great grandmother used to regale from her own foalhood. Tales of a restless green sky crackling with lightning, of jagged smoking canyons blocking wanderers from venturing more than an hour inland of the refugee camps surrounding what remained of Old Port Sahadi. Her k’idimi āyati had been barely twelve years old when the Great Dying finally reached Vhanna’s ravaged coasts. Crops already twisted and feeble from an irradiated water table grew limp, withered, and took on an irreversible rot. It spread like a virus just like it had in now abandoned villages in the south, working its way through scraggly fields like an invisible plague. Without the benefit of wings or horns, her ancestors were forced to make a choice: attempt to trek two thousand miles inland in the thin hope that the gryphon lands were still habitable and, less likely, hospitable to their zebra neighbors. Or help the starving survivors of Old Port Sahadi repair and refloat one of the many abandoned ships hurled up onto the beach when the world ended. Her ancestors had chosen the latter and, against all odds, managed to patch up the rotting fiberglass hull of a small yacht barely enough to survive the voyage to the home of their enemy.

Barely. The boat that ran aground north of Las Pegasus did so with more dead than living. Her k’idimi āyati often recalled the indignant hatred that filled her when the boat’s radio picked up the first broadcast from Equestria: music, of all things. Happy music from a time none of them had known. She admitted to wishing for the boat to sink rather than to see their smiling faces, only to change her mind when the endless overcast rolled overhead and she witnessed the terrible wasteland the ponies of Equestria called home.

Weathers lifted a wing above her head and spread her feathers to examine the faint lavender stripes striating their vanes. Her ancestors believed in traditions more than bloodline and her grandfather married a dustwing mare who gave birth to her mother. Seventeen years later, her mother caught the eye of a newly enlisted Enclave stallion on his first long-range reconnaissance mission. Her father would later joke that it was no wonder he washed out with someone like her mother distracting him, but in reality the truth was more complicated. He, like many living in the little towns that dotted the Enclave’s outer territory, disagreed with what happened when dustwings were found but knew better than to put their own heads on the chopping block by voicing their discomfort. Some fights couldn’t be won but her father, ever one to bend any rule he could get his wings around, knew what would happen to her mother and her family if he did nothing.

Not having the stomach for execution, he did what her mother often said felt like the next best thing. He convinced his commanding officer to take the bewildered, feathered zebras to New Canterlot as Ignorants. While technically it was a clause in Enclave law carved out for dustwings originating from seclusion (see: Stables) who were arguably unaware of their classification or what it meant, somehow her father had managed to convince the adjudicator in New Canterlot that this family of striped pegasi qualified under the same protections. Whether he had a sound argument or, more likely, he had simply exhausted the poor legal experts assigned to the case was up in the air. What mattered was that her father’s stubbornness earned New Canterlot its first zebra citizens since its founding. Unsurprisingly their acceptance made headlines for which Primrose herself had offered vaguely supportive commentary along the lines of the world being one step closer to healing. It was little more than puff, but compared to the alternative her family clung to it like a lifeline.

They were assigned a home outside Steepleton with a not so subtle reminder that they would be expected to upkeep it. Her father, then still an enlisted stallion tasked with keeping tabs on the family he shoehorned into the Enclave, quickly grew attached to the mare who first caught his eye and nature took things from there. Weathers was something of an accident. Her father’s discharge from armed service was not.

Ever loyal to the Enclave, despite living in a dilapidated house the neighbors treated as a roadside attraction, her family endured mistrust and mistreatment because the life that came before it had been far worse. Her mother used to say Weathers had kicked her way out of the womb like she had something to prove, which wasn’t far from the truth. A large part of her own enlistment was to put a stop to her schoolmates questioning her loyalty. Privately, a smaller part of that was to get back at the faceless officers who kicked out her dad for mixed breeding. She wanted to show them that a pegasus with stripes could do more than some pureblood behind a desk.

She snorted at the memory and supposed she’d done that much, at least. Her family crossed an ocean so she could be where she was today. Now her meticulously planned future was one big question mark. If Primrose had done what Sledge’s videos suggested, it meant she was the source of the suffering Weathers’ family endured. If that were the case, the easiest thing to do would be putting a bullet in the traitor’s head. Remove the rot before it could spread any further.

A sigh passed her lips as logic complicated the equation.

What if Sledge’s footage had somehow been manufactured? What if it was real, Primrose died, but she already had someone in line to take her place as a contingency? Would the Enclave be strong enough to stop the Steel Rangers from marching in to claim the thrones?

Dozens of unanswerable questions swirled in her head. Ahead of her lay countless options, some less risky than others but none of them safe. The only silver lining was that no matter what happened, the fallout would never reach her parents who had been laid to rest within weeks of one another years ago. The consequences of her decision would fall squarely on her shoulders.

She settled her wing across her belly and tried to pretend like it made her choice any easier. She continued to lay there, restless gears spinning in her head, until her ears perked at the sound of ratcheting beyond her cell. Deputy Stratus looked up from his paperwork to watch the unpowered door inch its way up its frame. She watched his brow tick up with recognition as their visitor ducked through the gap, the drudgery of deskwork forgotten.

“Ma’am,” he greeted.

Weathers pursed her lips as the ghoul stepped into view of the bars. Colorful filaments of Rainbow Dash’s once iconic mane hung against one side of her neck, crumpled and tangled by age or trauma or both. Rainbow stepped toward the deputy and murmured something to him. He nodded, stood, and left the room without a word.

She sat up, partly out of respect and partly so she could defend herself if the need arose. A clear pensive silence trailed Rainbow as she stepped into the open cell door, stopped, and propped her shoulder against the bars. The ghoul… no, she thought. Not the ghoul. She’d suffered the irreversible decay like the other living corpses of the wasteland but she hadn’t committed the crime of consuming resources meant for the living.

The mare didn’t make eye contact with her. Her gaze rested firmly on the floor. Seconds passed.

“So. I have some things I need to say to you and I’m going to ask that you don’t interrupt. Just let me talk. Okay?”

She sat up a little straighter and nodded, once. “Yes, ma’am.”

Rainbow visibly tensed at the word. “They didn’t deserve it. Vhanna, Equestria, my friends, my parents… none of them deserved to die the way Spitfire and Primrose made them die. When you came here I assume you saw the bodies in the tunnel. I had to listen to them kill their foals because the only other choice they had was to let them starve or turn feral. And they knew I was there with them, hiding. But I’d given up. So they did too, and I sat there in that tiny room until the crying and screaming stopped and something inside me broke.”

She remained silent as she watched Rainbow bite down on her lip for a moment, struggling for composure.

“My mom had to start her life over from nothing and she kicked ass at it because that’s just what she did. She even adopted a kid. She didn’t know I was right outside, trapped in my own head most of the time. She just did the best she could with the time she had left and now she’s gone like everyone else I ever knew. I’m never going to see her again. I’m never going to tell her I’m sorry or that I love her or how much I miss them now that they’re gone and it kills me because there’s no one who knows what it feels like to know none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been a coward.”

Rainbow paused again, but it was clear this time she was struggling to parse what she wanted to say from what she needed to say. Weathers waited. As she did, something she’d heard her mother say during her grandmother’s funeral rose to the surface. Her pronunciation wouldn’t impress a native speaker, but she’d grown up hearing enough Vhannan to do the little proverb some justice.

“Inide ch’ira, ts’ets’eti yabek’ali.”

Rainbow blinked at her. “I, ah… don’t know what that means.”

“My elders would probably say the same of me.” She smiled a little and cleared her throat. “It means, ‘Like a tail, regret comes to an end.’”

She coughed. “Thanks. I needed more empty platitudes.”

Weathers lifted her brow and said nothing. She could argue her sincerity until she was blue in the face and it wouldn’t make a difference in the end. Foreign as it was to think about, Rainbow Dash hadn’t come here to mend bridges or make new friends. This wasn’t the bright eyed, wet nosed mare who cut the skies in all the old foal’s tales. She was old, tired, and hurting. A part of Weathers had privately hoped she would be that mare of legend and not so normal.

She was also running out of steam. The molten anger she poured over Weathers when they first spotted each other had ever so slightly cooled in the hours since then, but even now she seemed unready to quench it completely.

“You say regret comes to an end.” Rainbow lifted her head and looked her in the eye. “Know what I regret? I regret letting myself willingly sit on the sidelines while Spitfire hijacked my ministry. I regret that I tricked myself into believing she was still good inside, and not having the good sense to think about what my name gave her access to. I regret waiting to hit rock bottom before I had enough guts to tell my closest friend how I felt about her. We barely had one honest year together before Spitfire pushed the fucking button. Applejack was there for me, and I just sat back and let somebody take that away.”

Weathers hesitated before opening her mouth to speak.

Rainbow leveled a feather at her. “Don’t. Don’t give me the same shit everyone else has about how it’s not my fault and I can’t punish myself for it. It is and I will. I’m the reason she had access to my gold codes. I could have said no. I could have taken control and none of this would have happened, but I didn’t because I couldn’t stand the thought of having this,” she pulled at her necklace, shaking it hard enough for the plates to jangle, “taken away. Now the world is gone and I’m to blame for it. One of the perks of being an Element of Harmony? I don’t have the luxury of forgetting. It won’t let me.”

Silence crept into the room, but then Weathers remembered reading something about the elements back when she was young and full of theories. It could be argued that her instructors thought it was easier to send her to the Archives rather than suffer her runaway curiosity, and it was there she found an article that stuck with her. “You used to call it a Harmonic Restoration, right? It’s what reversed the effects of your battle with Lord Discord.”

Rainbow tucked her wing back with a scoff. “Twilight would’ve loved to know that stupid name of hers ended up sticking. The rest of us just called it what it was: a reset.”

“That’s a little… beige.”

“You sound like Rarity.” She didn’t smile, but her expression softened by a few degrees. “It wasn’t named after the thing with Discord, and we never technically fought him. He just sat there half the time. He was weird like that.”

Her ears perked a little. That was new information.

Rainbow leaned a little more comfortably against the bars. “Twilight made up the term after getting away with casting a half-finished spell that put our brains in a blender. The five of us spent half a day in what the doctors up in Canterlot called magically induced psychosis. Twilight’s spell shredded our memories and stitched together the fragments until we forgot who we were. The worst of it is deep down we knew we were being manipulated and we couldn’t do anything to stop it. It felt like I was riding shotgun in my own body. It was awful. Twilight ended up fixing it by playing pin-the-Element-on-the-pony and even got a new pair of wings for the trouble.”

Weathers put together the rest on her own. “Being the one to give the phenomenon a name would have muddied the waters for anyone who might have wanted to see her punished.”

Rainbow shrugged. “Maybe. It doesn’t matter now. All I know is I just spent the last…”

Weathers glanced at the clock hanging above the deputy’s desks. “Four hours.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. “I spent the last four hours reliving every minute of my life with better clarity than my actual memory. I don’t get to pretend anymore that I didn’t ignore the red flags. I chose not to see them because Spitfire gave me a reason to pretend nothing was my problem anymore. I wanted things to go back to the way they were so badly that I let myself stop caring. That’s how she and Primrose were able to form the Enclave. Not because they were evil. Because I gave up.”

Rainbow paused, and for a long moment Weathers thought she was done speaking. She watched her lift a feather to her eyes and scrub at the small patches of damp where tears had gathered. The Element of Loyalty appeared almost calm now, and Weathers felt the relief that came whenever she was certain the worst of a storm had finally passed.

She flicked the moisture off her feather and regarded her with a startling calm.

“Sooner or later you’re going to be sent back out there to be with your people, and you’re going to be tempted to tell them I’m here and I’m alive. If you’ve already decided that’s what you’re going to do, then that’s that. I won’t risk this Stable by holding you captive. All I want is for you to know who it is you’re really telling, and more importantly I want you to understand who you’re working for. Primrose isn’t divinely chosen. She murdered billions so she could rule survivors like you.”

With that, Rainbow pushed her shoulder away from the bars and turned to leave. She’d nearly gone by the time Weathers mustered the courage to speak again.

“She didn’t do it for power.”

Rainbow stopped and looked back.

Weathers thought about clamming up and letting the awkward moment chase Rainbow the rest of the way out, but she knew she’d regret saying nothing after the chance was gone. She was uncertain about many things in life but for some reason this wasn’t one of them. If Minister Primrose wanted to rule, it would have been nothing for her to smuggle a balefire bomb into Canterlot and kill the princesses and spare a prospering world at the same time. Instead she chose to bathe the planet in a sea of unnatural fire whose solely unique property was the true core of her ambition.

She took a breath and spoke words which were grounds for execution. “She destroyed the old world to make room for a new one where magic wouldn’t be a threat.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t have to. Sledge showed me the footage.”

Slowly, the last vestiges of Rainbow’s hostility drained away to be replaced with sudden understanding and, on the heels of that, embarrassment. Her shoulders sagged with the exhalation of a long, weary breath. “You’ve seen everything?”

She nodded, her thoughts darkening with the recent memory. “I saw a young mare crying as she watched Equestria burn from orbit, and I watched this Stable nearly collapse after Primrose found out that same mare’s mother knew the truth.”

Rainbow stared at her. “And?”

“And I’m still trying to get my head around it. It’s a lot to take in.”

Silence. Then:

“You know, Sledge said there’s a mare living a few levels down who makes homemade booze in her compartment. Wanna swing by and get something to drink? Maybe talk more?”

She imagined herself walking outside to resume her responsibilities with everything she knew rattling around in her head and the thought of it made her stomach churn. But she couldn’t stay here. Soon she would have no choice but to go back to her people knowing who their minister was, while one of the original six carved out something amounting to a life in a ghoul’s body. Her very existence represented a landmine to the Enclave’s understanding of what it was.

Life, it seemed, was going to become very complicated very soon.

“Yeah,” she said, and stood. “I could use a drink.”

Paper crinkled under Aurora’s ear, bringing back mixed memories of being taken to the infirmary by her parents whenever she had the sniffles or upset stomach. She’d never been a sickly foal but she knew she’d been here a few times more often than her friends growing up. Sickness of any kind was a serious matter in an insulated population and her mom and dad were no slouches about ferreting out whether their daughter was trying to tough something out. Still there was something nostalgic about being here again even if the bright lights were dark and they only had an electric lantern to see by. It made the normally sterile exam room feel cozy.

Ginger sat in a chair beside the exam table and idly sifted her magic through Aurora’s mane, quietly resurrecting the gentle curls she’d styled the white mess on her head into that night at Stable 6.

She smiled at the memory. All her adult life she’d refused to bother herself with prettying up her mane or tail when both would wind up caked in oil or metal shavings but most likely both. Standing in front of a mirror for more time than it took to brush her teeth felt like a waste of time. And now here she was, feeling giddy butterflies all over again at something as simple as Ginger humming a melody while she curled her mane.

“I think he forgot we’re here,” she murmured.

Ginger quirked a lip and looked to the closed door where the doctor had disappeared through after saying he’d be back to check on her casting in fifteen minutes. That had been close to a half hour ago and Aurora was beginning to wonder if the silicone mold around her stump would ever come off.

“Oh, you probably scared him off.” Ginger released the long lock in her magic, approving of the way it twisted around itself before falling against her neck. “He seems very professional.”

She rolled her eyes at the tiny smile on Ginger’s face. “Hey. Quit picking on the cripple.”

“You still have one more limb than I do. If that makes you crippled, then what am I? An invalid?”

A snort darted out of her. “Prettiest invalid I’ve ever met.”

This time it was Ginger’s turn to roll her eyes, but she rewarded the compliment with a small kiss and a look that said she best quit complaining. Aurora knew better by now than to squeeze Ginger for pity. Even without electricity the Stable’s medical facilities outclassed anything the wasteland had left to offer. She’d lost her leg, and no one would argue her recovery wouldn’t be difficult, but the fact that she had prospects of a recovery at all was significant.

She shifted her shoulder into a better position and glanced at the door. Maybe she had scared him away. She hadn’t exactly minced words with him once she saw him lift the speculum out of his drawer. In reality she probably owed the old stallion an apology once he got back. She’d just come back from an irradiated wilderness twenty pounds lighter and bearing several new scars. Of course he’d want to be thorough.

She shut her eyes and sighed. “Was I an asshole?”

A smirk colored Ginger’s reply. “You weren’t not an asshole, but if it makes you feel a little better you weren’t as bad as Rainbow Dash.”

She groaned at the thought of saying sorry to Doctor Poke n’ Prod of all pegasi. “Can you blame her, though? I mean… Luna’s night. Spitfire didn’t just shut the door on her, she helped end the world. She lost everything and almost went feral waiting for the Stable to open again, only to find out the Enclave is thriving. I’m amazed she didn’t try to kill Weathers.”

Ginger lifted another length of mane and hummed acknowledgment. “I think she was working herself up to it. I can’t say I’m impressed with the other residents who simply stood around doing nothing.”

“She’s an Element of Harmony. I’m surprised we stepped in.”

“Since when has thinking ahead ever been our strong suit?”

She stopped, frowned, then chuckled. “Point made. It makes me wonder, though. Do you think it’s possible some of the others survived?”

She watched as Ginger’s gaze grew distant and a tired sadness crept into her eyes. Then the moment passed. “You know what? I think I’m more interested in any sweaty questions your father plans to spring on me at this dinner you’ve roped me into.”

“Sweaty questions?”

Ginger dropped a freshly curled strand over her muzzle and smiled as she watched Aurora puff it away. “What are your intentions toward my daughter? How were you raised? Will your relationship present any business opportunities between the families?”

She blinked. “Business…?”

Ginger flicked a dismissive hoof. “One of the astoundingly tone deaf questions my father asked a very platonic friend of mine after I invited him to the house when we were… goddesses, we must have been eleven or twelve? His name was Reed, and anyway, he had a genuine obsession with that old pre-war radio series, Sheath and Dagger, and he convinced me to give it a try. Our family’s holotape player was a sought after model that could record duplicate tapes so he brought his collection over. My father isn’t someone I’d call a good stallion, but when it came to my sister and I he was enthusiastically protective and you can imagine what was going through his head when he saw his youngest daughter bringing the neighbor colt home.”

Aurora let out a sympathetic chuckle. “He got both barrels, huh?”

She smiled and gathered the whole of Aurora’s mane in her light, joining the disparate curls into a sheet of long white ripples. “Neither of us were really old enough to grasp what he was concerned about. We just thought he didn’t like S&D.”

“If you think about it, sheath and dagger sounds exactly what he was worried about.”

Ginger paused, then snorted despite herself. “Good grief, Aurora.”

She smiled and the conversation meandered on. It felt nice, and not just the gentle pull of Ginger’s magic on her mane. All of it. Just being home, safe from the dangers lurking outside, not having to strategize where to go next or have her mind constantly tied in knots around a mystery that never seemed to end. Even before she left the Stable she hadn’t had what she had now, and she was beginning to understand what she’d been missing all this time.

Back when she and Carbide were an item, it always felt to her like their relationship was a dance whose steps had already been laid out for them to follow. Things had begun with physical attraction and for a while that was fine, but as time had gone on and their fellow residents became aware of their relationship the pressure of expectation grew heavy, and quickly. They did their best to follow all the steps without acknowledging that they were just going through the motions, and with both of them pulling the same long shifts in Mechanical it was to use the sex as a relief valve that bolstered their self-deception that what they had was what everyone else had. It came as a relief, then, when she ended things.

Ginger wasn’t anything like Carbide. They’d fought alongside one another. Saved one another. When Ginger realized she was struggling just to exist with the existential stresses of being in the wasteland she didn’t pass her off to Roach as his problem. She stepped right into the thick of it and talked her through the worst of it. She listened, and more than that, she cared deeply about what Aurora had to say. In the short three weeks they’d spent together, they’d endured trial after trial that bonded them in a way very few could be.

And they’d made it here. Home, together.

“What’s that look for?”

Aurora blinked. “What look?”

The door clicked open as Ginger started to answer, and she settled for a knowing wink instead as Dr. Fetlock stepped back into the exam room. Paper crackled again as Aurora lifted her head to watch him set a hard case on the counter, his professionally stoic expression masking any hint of lingering discomfort he might have after her not so indirect dismissal earlier. He was all business, cracking open the case while sparing a quick glance at the laminated card fixed to the lid. Aurora squinted at the logo at the top of the card and frowned when she didn’t see the usual Stable-Tec insignia. Instead, Maiden Pharmaceutical was stamped at the top.

She sighed as he removed two syringes from the foam molded interior and set them beside the case. “More shots?”

He pivoted an ear toward her and nodded. “I would have been back sooner but Supply is following the overstallion’s new resource restrictions to the letter. I understand your objections to a physical exam, but I’d be negligent not to offer you treatment for your exposure to the surface.” He gathered both syringes and stepped over to her bedside, holding up one and then the other as if expecting her to understand the medical gibberish printed on each label.

“This is pentetic acid,” he said, indicating the needle loaded with slightly yellowish fluid as she sat herself up on the table. “It will bind to the radioactive particles in your blood so you’re able to pass them in your urine. Supply has cleared you for double water rations for today and tomorrow so you won’t dehydrate.”

Aurora gave the needle a dubious look. “It sounds like Radaway.”

The stallion showed no sign of recognition. “They may be chemically similar, but I can’t speak for the efficacy of what you were treated with before. As for your hind leg, I’m not going to put all my faith in the medical treatment of organized scavengers in a non sterile environment.” He held up the other needle. Its contents appeared innocuous in its lack of color, but the cursive lettering of StimPack tucked beside a trademark symbol in the corner caught her eye. Seeing her expression shift, he added, “That’s not to say they didn’t perform passable work. Whoever treated you was experienced.”

She shrugged him off. “Radaway for the radiation, stimpack for the stump. I get it.”

On the other side of the table, Ginger’s Pip-Buck pinged. Her brow furrowed at the screen as she worked her way through a device she still hadn’t quite gotten the hang off. When she noticed them waiting on her, she shook her head. “Go ahead. I’ll be a minute.”

Fetlock didn’t skip a beat. “Pentetic acid is a strong diuretic, so it’s vital you drink all of your water rations while it’s working. You may also experience some discomfort in your stump for a day or two, and there’s a chance it could disrupt your sleep. Being unable to fall asleep is fairly common and should subside after twenty-four hours but if you experience hallucinations or night terrors, come see me and I can prescribe a temporary sleep aid.”

She pursed her lips as he uncapped the first syringe. “I don’t know why I avoid coming here when you make medicine sound so fun,” she said dryly.

He didn’t offer anything in retort as he wiped an alcohol swab against her shoulder and sank the needle. She winced and stared straight ahead until he had done the same with the other and directed her hoof onto the cotton ball pressed to the wound. She sat there and wondered why she couldn’t help but badger the poor stallion when he was just trying to help, but as he disposed of the syringes and moved toward the silicone cast glued to her stump she could feel the window for an apology slide shut.

The mold came off without trouble, leaving behind several inches of shaved skin the color of charcoal and a long crescent of thick black stitches the Enclave had sewn for her. Her lip twitched with embarrassment, and she quietly tucked what remained of her leg toward the other.

“This impression should be fine,” he murmured. “I’ll have this sent to Fabrication to have it scanned once the power is back on. Millie will let you know when you can come back to see how the finished socket fits, and after that we’ll set up an appointment to discuss compatible schematics for a permanent prosthesis.”

She nodded. “As long as Ginger and I are allowed to build the final product, that’s fine.”

It didn’t take a keen eye to see the objections forming on his face, but they’d argued about this once already and he didn’t seem willing to dive into that piranha pit a second time. “Of course. Until then, you know you can come to me if anything changes.”

With that he packed up the hard case and left the room. She felt a touch of guilt for refusing full treatment, but not much. She’d been shot, bitten, beaten and dosed with enough radiation to make the toilet bowl glow and survived all of it. Probably being in the wasteland had shaved a few years off her life. No big surprise there. Blood tests and an ice cold duckbill under her tail weren’t going to undo any of it.

She was ready to go. When she turned to ask Ginger for help getting down from the table, she paused. Ginger was smiling down at her Pip-Buck, something that rarely ever seemed to happen whenever the device had something to say.

“Good news?”

Ginger nodded and turned the screen so she could read. “See for yourself.”

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Ministry Interoffice Mail :: Crusader Encryption Enabled
To: Ginger Dressage
From: Minister Primrose
Subject: Delivery Scheduled
04/22/1297

Ms. Dressage,

Please inform the current overseer to expect the arrival of the agreed upon ignition talisman tomorrow morning, prior to dawn. I have tasked the delivery to a special unit who have been instructed to complete this mission unarmed. They have been informed in advance that whomever your overseer chooses to receive the talisman may also choose to remain armed. I will not pass judgment on whichever election you make in that regard, and advise only that you do not attempt to lure them into the Stable or prevent Colonel Weathers from departing.

This unit will be under the command of Lt. Col. Cedar. He will meet you at the Stable door to facilitate the exchange. Do not speak to him. He is mute by choice and will not respond.

And lastly, please give my regards to Aurora for her bravery and perseverance. She exemplified the exact qualities Commander Spitfire sought to preserve. It has been my honor to play a role in the continued conservation of her project, and I truly hope to be present when Stable 10 is ready to open itself to a better Equestria.

Respectfully,
Minister Primrose

The shift in Sledge’s demeanor when they shared the good news was infectious. He sank into the padding of his chair as the tension he’d been holding onto evaporated. Ginger only knew the stallion through Aurora’s stories, but it was clear to her that the past three weeks of holding a sinking Stable together had taken a physical toll on him. Between excavating the dark truth behind the end of Old Equestria, discovering the depths of Spitfire’s complicity, and now having to keep tabs on the last living Element of Harmony who had recently checked herself out of the infirmary to lock horns a second time with their guest, Sledge had more than his fair share of problems to deal with.

Ginger thought he’d looked like a courier who’d just run the gauntlet from Las Pegasus to Manehattan without a break in between. Now, finally, they had good news. She looked down at the time on her Pip-Buck and felt her own burst of relief that in less than ten hours Aurora’s stricken home would be secure again, and with it their future.

Now all she had left to worry about was making a good impression with Dusky Pinfeathers. That, she decided, she could manage.

Aurora’s wing wrapped her midsection as she helped her with the stairs to the upper residential level. It’d been a long day for both of them and while Aurora wanted to show she was adapting to her injury, two days and a few stimpacks did not make up for the physical toll missing a leg was taking on her. She flinched a little with every third step. Ginger privately wished she knew a spell that could simulate Aurora’s missing limb, but there were some obstacles just better suited for medicine.

Ginger let her lead the way down the corridors to her father’s compartment. On the way they encountered a herd of foals barrelling this way and that down the half-lit hall as they played an exuberant game of tag. A small group of adults, clearly their parents, gossiped with one another around the open door of one of their compartments. One of them spotted the two mares making their way down the hall and nodded with something like deference as they passed while the others politely averted their eyes. Ginger hoped she wouldn’t wind up forced to wear one of the gaudy boiler suits the pegasi here put on every day. She kept her tail low, relieved that at least one of the adults had regarded her with a friendly smile. It was progress, she supposed.

“Here,” Aurora said, slowing to an uneven stop outside a door whose name plaque simply read D. PINFEATHERS. She gripped Ginger more tightly to steady herself as she rapped a hoof against the steel panel. “Knock knock, dad!”

The door hadn’t been fully closed, allowing the older stallion’s voice to carry through the gap at their hooves. “Come in! Oh shoot, Aurora, give me a minute. I’ll get the door for you!”

“I have it, Mr. Pinfeathers!”

She had the bottom of the door wrapped in magic before he could trouble himself with working the jack handle. With the slab whisking up into its recess, it took some effort for her not to smile at the sight of Aurora’s father's expression as he watched it rise from where he stood at his little kitchenette. He held a slightly dented but well cared for steel bowl in the crook of his wing while the other clutched a set of tongs buried in its leafy contents. His astonishment didn’t so much fade as much as he managed to set it aside for another time, and his wide eyes creased with a well weathered smile.

“Thank you, Ginger,” he said, sparing the open doorway one last glance before gesturing toward the small, circular table at the center of the room. “Sit down, you two. I’m almost done.”

She let the door settle back down until it came to rest onto a trio of hardcover books he’d used for a shim. The paper bowed out as she rested its weight onto them, leaving just enough room to see the shadows of hooves passing in the corridor.

“Showoff,” Aurora whispered in her ear.

“Unapologetically so,” she murmured back with a smile.

The main room of Dusky’s compartment offered a fair bit more space than Aurora’s and it didn’t take long to understand why. The three walls of the little combination dining room/kitchen that weren’t reserved for cooking were adorned with dozens of photographs held in their own unique frames, some clustered together while a few others had been given their own shelves to sit on alongside what she could only guess were family mementos. She helped Aurora into a chair at the table and diverted toward one such shelf set beside a comfortable looking red recliner.

A younger version of Aurora smiled back at her from behind the glass, all teeth and twinkling green eyes. Ginger pursed her lips to keep herself from laughing at the filly in the photo, her messy, short-trimmed mane an exercise in controlled chaos as she held up in both wings a wooden box adorned in worn brown knobs. A radio, Ginger realized. She barely recognized it with all the parts still attached.

In the photo’s reflection she watched Aurora’s father round the table and give her a firm squeeze with his free wing. “Proud of you, kiddo,” she heard him whisper. She flushed a bit and pretended not to have overheard.

“She won that at the Junior Apprentices raffle when she was nine,” he said, stepping beside her to admire the photo. “First thing she did with it when she got home was take it apart. Probably would have tried disassembling the tubes too if her mother hadn’t caught her.”

Ginger looked over to Aurora and lifted a brow. “That sounds like her.”

Aurora shot her a lovingly exaggerated grin from her seat.

“Oh, there,” he said, reaching past her to point at a frame hanging in a cluster of other pictures further down the wall. “Second one from the bottom.”

“Dad…”

She audibly gasped at the doe-eyed foal staring out from her little silver frame. Sure she was hamming it up just a little to draw an embarrassed groan from Aurora, but the tiny version sitting in her high chair with easily as much pureed carrots on her face and hooves as there was on the tray in front of her was too precious to go without comment. The cherry on top was the absolutely baffled expression on Aurora’s little face, as if the effort of eating lunch had rocked her infant mind.

Her father chuckled, making his way back to the table to set the bowl in his wing at the center. “I’ll be nice and leave the albums in storage.”

She stepped closer to the mosaic of family memories, finding herself not quite able to pull away just yet. Her head tilted ever so slightly at a dapple gray mare looking up from a cluttered workbench with an exasperated smile, the crow’s feet around her eyes hinting at a mare unafraid to show her feelings. For a split second Ginger thought she was looking at Aurora caught working away the hours down in her second home in Mechanical, but this mare couldn’t be any younger than fifty. It finally clicked who she was looking at when she realized the mare’s radiant golden mane wasn’t a trick of the light, but her natural shade. This wasn’t Aurora. It was her mother.

Aurora’s father gently cleared his throat. “Her name was Nimbus.”

“She’s very pretty.” Rather than draw out an uncomfortable moment, she stepped back from the photos and retreated to the table. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pinfeathers, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

He waved her off and tipped his nose to the open chair beside Aurora. “Lucky for you, you’re family so you get a free pass. And call me Dusky. Now sit, or I really will dig out the photo albums.”

Aurora practically yanked her into the vacant chair while Dusky went to the cupboards and fished out three bowls. As he dispensed dishes and cutlery, Ginger quietly enjoyed the warmth that bloomed in her at being called family. The unironic sincerity in the way he said it had caught her off guard, and for a moment she had to avert her eyes until the little lump in her throat went away.

By the time Dusky finished setting the table, she’d composed herself well enough to venture a peek at the greens set in the middle of the table. A smile touched her lips at the simple salad he’d prepared. A colorful mishmash of diced cucumber and peaches lay stirred in with quartered tomatoes, what appeared to be tiny corn cobs and a heavy bedding of baby spinach. The little corns had been lightly seared, suggesting a genuine recipe, and even as he seated himself Dusky took the tongs from the bowl and gave the combination a generous turn. As if to offer its own complement, her stomach emitted an unignorable peal. Dusky’s smile widened as he sank the tongs back into the bowl.

“Dig in,” he urged, and soon the salad tongs had made their way to each of them.

A pleasant calmness settled between them as forks clinked and they shared the tiny pleasured utterances that never failed to signify a good meal, and although the leaves were a little wilted and the tomatoes overripe it was easily one of the best tasting dishes Ginger had in years. Neither she nor Aurora asked the obvious question of how Dusky had gotten his hooves on so many fresh ingredients when the Stable was on rations. The answer was obvious. He’d broken the rules and done a little personal shopping to do something special for his daughter and her new partner. As she sank her fork through a tiny toasted earlet of corn, she found herself smiling in spite of the little theft.

Seeing everyone had settled in, Dusky speared a morsel from his bowl and watched her for a moment from across the table. “So, how are you liking it?”

She looked up from her dinner and smiled. “It’s delicious. I haven’t had fresh greens like this since I was young.”

He didn’t seem to need an explanation to understand there were some painful reasons behind her innocuous statement, and she felt an unusual appreciation when he refrained from prying. “Salads aren’t too hard to get right.” He chuckled to himself and regarded her again. “I was thinking more along the lines of our Stable. Is it much different from where you came from?”

Talk about a loaded question. She popped her fork into her mouth to stall long enough for a graceful response to take shape, all the while marveling at Aurora’s ability to practically inhale her dinner. Her portion was doomed the moment it touched her bowl. She resisted the urge to tease her, not knowing how her father might respond.

“It’s different.” She kicked herself for the brainless answer and elaborated further. “It’s quieter than I pictured.”

Aurora’s ears perked up at that, as did her father’s. She winced at the double dose of concern growing between them.

“I mean that as a good thing,” she hastily added, gesturing vaguely with her hoof as if hoping to summon the right words to properly convey how she felt. “Before I met Aurora, I lived above a small shop that I owned not far from here. Every morning the first thing I would do was go downstairs to make sure nothing got stolen. Sometimes I’d check in the middle of the night, otherwise I wouldn’t sleep. Junction City was one of those no name towns too small to support a Ranger installation, and it’s not uncommon for road bandits and would-be raiders to come through to cut their teeth picking our locks.”

Dusky frowned. “Raiders?”

She hesitated before offering a tiny shrug. “Organized groups of killers and thieves. They tend to fill any spaces that aren’t claimed by other factions like the Steel Rangers or the Enclave.”

“Or Flim & Flam Mercantile,” Aurora added.

“Or them,” she agreed, while pointedly navigating around that fiasco entirely. Dusky looked bewildered enough already. “Anyway, there were always mornings when I’d find the back door broken in or signs that someone had tried and given up. Most days were normal. I’d take ten caps from the safe and see what the market had for food, then go back and open the store. Sometimes I would get a paying customer but most days it was just me and my sewing machine.”

“I assume you had neighbors who visited?”

She smiled to mask her discomfort. “Junction City wasn’t the sort of place where anyone knocked on your door for a cup of sugar. And I’ll admit, I didn’t put much effort into changing that.”

He grunted. “Sounds lonely.”

“It was,” she agreed, “and I did it for seventeen years thinking if I stuck with it long enough, somebody important would walk through my doors and finally put Gussets & Garments on the map. After that my life was guaranteed to take off. I’d be able to buy better locks, build a safe room behind the shop, or even pay somebody to safely escort me somewhere better where I wouldn’t have to worry about being evicted because I’d been robbed too frequently that month. It was remarkably easy to feel comfortable living at a perpetual dead end.”

She looked over to Aurora and her lip twitched upward. “And then your daughter showed up and dragged me into an adventure I didn’t ask for, and that was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.”

Aurora grinned and brushed the back of her wing against her hip.

Ginger met her eyes. “You taught me how to be myself and not someone I thought I had to be. Now I’m here. This morning I woke up without that creeping fear of not knowing whether I was in danger. All my life I’ve been tense and thought that was normal, and only two days of being in this Stable has me thinking that isn’t normal at all. It’s quiet here, but in the best way possible. I don’t think I’ll ever have the right words to explain it.”

“Life never lends itself to an easy summary.” Dusky stared into his bowl and chewed thoughtfully for a while, allowing a different silence to filter between them. They ate with their thoughts heavy, giving the air time to clear.

The hush lingered.

And lingered.

She almost dropped her fork at the abrupt noise of Aurora’s chair scraping across the floor, propelled by the mare’s single hind leg. Aurora’s face was an exaggeration of great concern as she leaned close and loudly whispered, “Ginger. Ginger, I think you made it awkward.”

Dusky broke into a broad smile and laughed, prompting Ginger to shake her head and do the same. Conversation resumed with a renewed brightness, leading them through the rest of dinner and well after the table had been cleared. She and Aurora shared stories about the wasteland and in exchange Dusky told them tales of his younger years, some of which even Aurora hadn’t heard before, and as the evening wore on Ginger felt less and less like an outsider. They talked about everything and nothing until every anecdote was punctuated with pleasant yawns, and when it was time to finally leave Dusky stopped them at the door and pulled Ginger into a hug and murmured in her ear.

“Keep my little filly out of trouble, will you?”

She assured him she would try her best but made no promises. He chuckled and reminded Aurora he loved her before finally allowing them to go. She couldn’t stop herself from grinning all the way back down to Aurora’s compartment. Their compartment.

She dropped her saddlebags at the foot of their unmade bed and resisted the urge to flop onto the mattress while Aurora skimmed the messages that had collected on her Pip-Buck. A smile crossed her face as she stopped to let Ginger read the update that came in from Sledge, letting them know with a touch of personal frustration that Rainbow Dash had woken up and marched straight back to Colonel Weathers. She was relieved to read Rainbow and Weathers had, to some extent, made peace with one another and had sussed out one of the Stable’s sources of illicit liquor while they licked their wounds.

It boded well, then, that Sledge’s primary concern was that Rainbow might put down enough booze to consider taking the colonel to bed. She snorted at that and pushed the Pip-Buck away, letting Aurora know that after all the poor ghoul had been through she was well within her rights to have a good time however she might define it.

They showered, toweled one another off, and as they slipped under the covers to share each other's warmth Ginger realized she wasn’t just safe. Here in this place, filled with pegasi she still had yet to meet, she finally found somewhere she belonged. And as her thoughts began to blend into the pleasant nonsense of sleep, she knew she would do everything in her power to protect the family she’d found at long last.

The ponies of another mare’s memories trotted down the cobbles, and Tandy smiled as they passed. They were figments, fractured recollections pulled and reassembled from the annals of her creator’s mind and set back into motion like lifelike wind-up toys. Luna had been guilty of many things in her lifetime, but few were ever aware that she often spent the minutes prior to her purely ceremonial role in raising the moon watching her subjects live their lives below the castle spires. Being privy to Luna’s memories, Tandy knew the ache the younger princess felt as she imagined herself walking among them with a life of her own, her sins and her crown forgotten. She felt a somber sympathy for Luna as she drifted down busy streets and peeked through windows, knowing the war and its conclusion had stolen away her chance to live that dream for herself.

In the back of her mind she could sense the dreamers arriving. She hoped to herself that they wouldn’t be bothered by a recurrence of their communal dream so soon after the last one, but something about showing Luna’s last moments to Ginger had sparked a sort of melancholy in her. Bringing all the dreamers here, together, made this better world almost real again.

She recognized each of them as they drifted into this abandoned realm. Pickett, an old stallion living with his wife in the Crystal Mountains, was always first to arrive. Looseleaf appeared next and unsurprisingly galloped straight to the capital’s grand balconies to memorize the towns and farms down below to inspire her paintings. A foal too young to tell Tandy her name appeared, and she quickly sent a figment mare to comfort the unfortunately gifted child until she woke from her nap. The dreamers all arrived at Tandy's illusion where they left it and she watched them for a time to ensure they were happy with it. Most were. Some appeared indifferent, having no connection with Old Canterlot or the world it came from.

One did, and his dream always began the same way. She closed her eyes and opened them again, appearing before the desperately infuriated zebra as she had so many nights before. Eshe stood at the intersection of two busy thoroughfares, face twisted with agony as he grasped where he was. As memories of carriages and box trucks droned inches away from him on either side, his lavender eyes fixed on her alone.

“Tafadhali, acha nizungumze nao. Mara moja tu.”

She shook her head. “I will not. You have led too many innocents to their death already.”

“Hawana haja ya kuja! Wacha waotaji watume jeshi kuchoma Mariposa, na mimi nayo!”

“The dreamers are meant to be protected. We have discussed this before, Eshe.”

“Mimi ni mwotaji, wewe pepo!”

“My rules have not changed. Do not become a disturbance to the others, lest I be forced to wake you.”

Eshe’s lip curled from his teeth. “Basi fanya. Haitasafisha dhamiri yako.”

Perhaps not, but she had seen his prison through his own eyes. She would not allow him to lure anyone into that gauntlet a second time.

“Behave yourself,” she warned, and faded before he could accost her again.

The other dreamers were trickling in steadily now. Her smile returned as she felt Ginger’s arrival at the cafe in the shopping quarter. A touch of concentration pulled her through the illusion like feathers expertly flitting through folders in a filing cabinet. Luna had spent many, many nights walking the city to the point where Tandy felt every brick and cobble imprinted like a tattoo on her very essence.

And even if she hadn’t, finding her way to Ginger was as simple an act as she could manage. The unicorn was a beacon that drew Tandy like a curious moth, and she went to her willingly. She found Ginger seated at the table she’d shared with Primrose, still with sleep fresh in her eyes.

Tandy formed herself behind the opposing chair and waited patiently for Ginger to finish staring at the clean buildings and notice she was there. When she did, Tandy could see something different in Ginger’s eyes. A deep, resolute calmness.

“Good evening, Tandy.”

She placed a hoof on the back of the chair. “Better, now. Would you like to sit or walk tonight?”

Ginger stretched her hooves and pushed away from the table. “It’d be nice to see the city without Primrose spoiling things. Where do you suggest we go first?”

Tandy paused to consider the question. She couldn't remember being asked for her opinion before. The other dreamers dealt with her like they would a book or an oracle. A source of information. A reference guide for a world long gone. Did she have preferences of her own?

“I know a place.”

She led her to the sidewalk, past shops and picture windows displaying all manner of colorful merchandise for sale to passers by. Ginger paused outside several stores to admire their displays while Tandy brought the figments inside to life, in one case directing a yellow stallion to place a threadlike silver necklace onto a black velvet bust behind the glass. Ghosts of a dead world offered polite nods and simple greetings as they made their way down the bustling sidewalk. All the while, Tandy paid attention to the last trickle of dreamers arriving. Primrose was not among them, which was strange for the little tyrant. Of all the creatures who retained enough residual magic to still access this realm, Primrose had done so like clockwork for two hundred and ten years. What changed?

“Luna’s night,” Ginger gasped.

She nearly corrected her before realizing it was an expression. The narrow road had opened up ahead of them as they approached the southerly edge of Old Canterlot and the grand balconies overlooking the verdant fields far below. Ginger’s hoofsteps hurried across the last intersection and down the stairs to the wide semicircular overlook at the bottom, and Tandy felt a touch of relief upon seeing her excitement. Her idea to bring Ginger here had been borrowed from Looseleaf who stood at the edge of the next platform over, her pale ears standing forward as she gobbled up as much of the vista as she could.

Tandy followed Ginger to a carved stone railing adorned with numerous signs warning visitors to be mindful of their foals. Figments of Wonderbolt sentries flew arcing patterns over the balconies, their presence regretfully required as the pressures of an unending war drove so many to find solace at the bottom of the drop.

“It’s beautiful,” Ginger remarked, her eyes wide as she drank in the view. Blocks of corn, wheat, soybeans and cranberry bogs followed each side of the ruler-straight line of Equestria’s first paved highway to touch both coasts. Plots of land were framed by narrow bands of lush foliage, and it all stretched from one horizon to the other beneath a clear blue sky. “Was all of it really this green?”

She joined her at the railing and nodded. “Even more so before industry came to Equestria.”

“May I see?”

“Of course you may.”

It took little effort to nudge the illusion into compliance. The highway vanished along with the gas stations and pit stops clustered between the neat patchwork of farmland. Deep forests spread out from the corners they’d been pushed into, devouring the orderly lines until only a few notable dirt roads could be discerned from the gaps in the foliage. A minor city near the horizon shrank to the size of a sleepy town dwarfed by the wild forest that bordered it. Here and there a few patches of land had been carved out for farmland, marked by a tiny barn or the telltale rows of trees that defied the natural disarray around them.

“That’s the Everfree Forest,” Ginger murmured.

Tandy winced at the frustrated shouts coming from the balcony where Looseleaf had been posted. “Considered by many at this time to be a place to be avoided, yes. The locals believed it to harbor curses, wild magic, and some professed it to have sentience of its own.”

Ginger gestured toward a patch of trees not far from the base of the mountain. “I know. New Canterlot wound up being built right down there and we grew up with the same stories. They all ended the same way, though. The Everfree stopped being scary once the first bulldozer was built.”

“Very true,” she mused. “You… are happier than usual tonight.”

The little unicorn’s cheeks pinched with a widening grin. “I had a very good day.”

She crossed her hooves over the railing, mimicking Ginger’s relaxed posture. The mare must have taken it to be an invitation to explain because she took a long breath and did just that. She spoke of her feelings of otherness upon arriving at the Stable she helped fight to save, divulging private fears that once the door closed for good she might be locked into a mistake she couldn’t ask to undo. She felt sadness over Roach being barred from coming with them, even if just to visit the place where his daughter and husband had been buried, but took some comfort in her suspicion that his attention toward Julip had begun developing into something deeper than mentorship. These were all the same fears Ginger had shared the night before, but Tandy knew she was working her way toward something and thus remained silent.

“And then today I met Aurora’s dad and we just hit it off. He didn’t ask about my horn, or dig into my past, or anything like that. He just looked at me like I was any other person he’d met and he was so polite.” She laughed and shook her head at the endless flora below. “He made me a salad! I haven’t had salad since I was little! And he didn’t want anything in return for it. He just… fed us. Because it was something he wanted to do. I know it sounds dumb, but it really meant something.”

“It must have been a good salad.”

Ginger set her forehead against the railing and groaned. “I’m not explaining myself well at all, am I?”

Tandy smiled at her. “You were afraid the Stable would not welcome you because you are different. Aurora’s father demonstrated that is not the case by giving you food and kindness.”

She looked up at her. “Right. Exactly that. How are you so good at this?”

“Time and practice.”

“Hmph. It took me over thirty years of my life to finally feel this happy.”

“A wise mare once told me not to begrudge the past.”

“Princess Luna?”

She shook her head. “No. No one so well known.”

They watched a Wonderbolt coast by just off the balcony, his gaze briefly lingering in their direction as he rode the mountain winds. Ginger lifted a hoof to greet the figment, then she furrowed her brow and sighed.

“Tandy, can I ask you a question?”

She tilted her head. “Always.”

“When you… make dreams for us, you’re building them from our memories. Right?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Ginger appeared to deflate a little. “So you already knew about the things I just told you about.”

“Yes,” she repeated, before adding, “but nonetheless I take great joy in our conversations. It is one thing to know a thing, and another to hear it recited by the one who experienced it.”

Several seconds passed as Ginger stared thoughtfully into the distance. “You like hearing how it made us feel?”

Tandy paused, then nodded. “In a sense, yes.”

Something akin to discomfort radiated from Ginger for a long while before she seemed to adjust to this knowledge. Tandy waited, torn by her own desire to make Ginger forget this conversation and the knowledge that doing so to other dreamers in the past only caused their friendship with her to fray and break. She didn’t want Ginger to mistrust her like the others did. This unicorn was a friend she wanted to keep.

She was thankful, then, when she felt Ginger’s emotions begin to settle. “So you’ve known about Rainbow Dash all along.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact. The questions were buried beneath it. Many of them, in fact. Tandy gestured one of Nightmare Moon’s black feathers toward the edge of the balcony, drawing Ginger’s attention to the golden necklace that now slowly rotated between them.

“I have not shared news of her survival with any of the dreamers.”

Ginger exhaled. “Good. Good.”

“And the magic her element still bears is not enough to restore Equestria to what it once was.” Seeing the sudden disappointment in her eyes, Tandy’s shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry. I know it is not what you hoped to hear.”

A family trotted up to the balcony’s edge beside them, memories on memories. Ginger hid the worst of her emotion behind a simple nod, but even then she couldn’t prevent Tandy from sensing her deep frustration. It wasn’t the first time she met a dreamer who had pinned their hopes on a miraculous return of the Elements of Harmony, yet it stung a little deeper each time. They wanted an easy solution. A button to press or a spell to cast. In the early years when the ash still hadn’t finished settling, a stallion desperately accused her of withholding knowledge of a mythical machine capable of terraforming balefire-scorched soil. She had argued that even if such a device did exist, it would have the power to destroy as easily as rebuild and could not be entrusted to any of the fragmented groups scrambling for power in their new world. It hadn’t been the answer he wanted to hear and the things he said he wished he could do to her still haunted her thoughts.

It would do little good to tell Ginger that, so she didn’t.

“Magic is not a solution,” she said. “It is a tool. A hammer or a sword depending on who wields it, and therein lies the core of what decides whether the wasteland recovers or continues to fester: the people living in it. Magic could return tomorrow but little would change until people learn to trust each other again. That on its own takes time.”

Ginger lit her horn and floated the projection of Rainbow’s necklace closer. Tandy watched her as her gaze drifted across the scrollwork formed into its broad plates, then down to the ruby lightning bolt clasped in its socket. “I wonder whether the ponies of Kiln might teach us that.”

Tandy paused to draw on Ginger’s memories of the town before nodding approvingly. “They live by example. I believe you can too by allowing yourself to be satisfied with what you have accomplished, and make room for the next dreamer to do the same.”

“I suppose my mother would probably slap my hoof for not listening to my elders.” She stared a moment longer at the necklace, then floated it back toward Tandy. “Promise me you won’t share this with Primrose?”

“Hey.”

“The little tyrant has not slept this night or the last.” With a gesture, the necklace dissolved. “But when she inevitably does, I give you my word that none of what we discussed will pass my lips to her. I would not jeopardize your bargain with her.”

“Wake up. I gotta pee.”

“Good. Just so we’re on the same page.”

“Celestia’s tits, you’re on my wing!”

Tandy held back a smile as Ginger registered the other voice. “I suggest you take that call. Quickly.”

Ginger looked over her shoulder, confused, before letting out an indignant yelp as an invisible force appeared to crawl over her. She woke, and her form winked out of existence like a puff of steam, leaving Tandy alone to contemplate Primrose’s absence.

“Aurora!? Are you–”

“Sorry!” Her bladder nearly burst in the process of stumbling across Ginger and over the side of the bed. If a mare could be pregnant with piss then she knew what it felt like. “Go back to sleep!”

She made it to the bathroom with seconds to spare, but for the grace of Celestia remembering at the last moment to yank her tail away from the bowl as she dropped onto it. The doctor hadn’t been mincing words when he said the meds would flush her out. She was just thankful that in the dark compartment Ginger couldn’t see the absolute relief that gripped her.

Sheets rustled in the other room. She winced at the sound of Ginger sitting up. “Are you going to be alright, or should I go ask somebody for a snorkel?”

She tried not to laugh but a tiny snort got past her anyway. After what felt like a biologically impossible quantity of liquid fled her body, she was finally able to clean up and hit the flusher. “Maybe next time I’ll just stay in bed and see how funny you are then.” As she limped back into the main room, it lit up with the bright white glow of Ginger’s Pip-Buck. Her eyes clamped shut. “Gah! I was kidding!”

In response, she felt the almost imperceptible tingle of Ginger’s magic wrap her body and hoist her onto the bed. The wasteland nights had given her ample opportunity to develop a knack for cocooning parts of Aurora in one way or another, many which resulted in pleasantly startled noises that nearly rousted Roach and Julip from their sleep. Aurora was a little disappointed then when the bed’s rumpled covers settled beneath her and Ginger’s magic dissipated. As her eyes adjusted to the glare, she managed to force one open and squint at the upturned screen.

She sat up with her and scooted her back against the headboard. “Are we expecting an update?”

Ginger tipped her head against her shoulder and hummed no. “Tandy told me that Primrose hasn’t slept for a while.” She yawned. “I was worried she was using the time to make a last second change. She hasn’t, yet.”

Aurora kissed the top of her head before nestling her chin into the short curls of her mane. “I thought it was my job to do all the worrying.”

Ginger chuckled to herself.

She smiled a little and closed her eyes, hoping they could fall asleep like this once Ginger turned off the screen. “What kind of dream were you having before I woke you up?”

“Tandy brought everyone back to Old Canterlot again. I got to see Equestria from the balconies.”

“That sounds nice.”

She could feel Ginger’s cheek twitch against her shoulder as she smiled. “It was beautiful.”

Something about the way she trailed off made her suspect something else had happened that didn’t sit as well with Ginger as the sights and sounds of Equestria’s lost capital city. She waited a moment to see if she might open up about it on her own, but when Ginger shifted uncomfortably and stayed silent, she gave her a gentle nudge.

“What happened?”

Ginger sighed. “Nothing bad happened, per se. I’m just bothered by something she kept to herself until tonight.”

She lifted her head and saw the helpless indignation painted across her face. Ginger’s eyes flicked up to meet hers for a moment before ducking back to the still glowing Pip-Buck.

“She knows everything each dreamer knows once they enter her realm. I didn’t get a chance to ask how it worked, but since she uses our minds to create our dreams I assume it’s instantaneous.”

Aurora tried to find the thread she was pulling at, but it eluded her. “So she can read minds? That’s… creepy.”

“I mean, yes, but that’s not what bothers me. Primrose is a dreamer, too. Tandy knows everything she knows, but she didn’t tell me until today even though she knew it could have helped us.” She shook her head, struggling to make her anger make sense. “I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” She shifted her shoulder to slide her wing behind Ginger’s back, and gave her the same reassuring squeeze her dad was notorious for. “You started having dreams after Autumn overdosed you on stimpacks, so let’s start there. What could we have done differently if we knew everything Primrose knew?”

Ginger chewed the inside of her lip, thinking. “We would have known where the Enclave stockpiles the tech they stole from all those Stables, including the ignition talismans. And we wouldn’t have had to go all the way to Fillydelphia. You wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“Assuming the stockpiles are anywhere we could get access to, and aren’t heavily guarded.”

“But Primrose would know a way to dismiss anyone assigned to it.”

She nodded thoughtfully, trying not to look like she was humoring Ginger as much as she really was. “Okay, so we somehow raid an Enclave stash and escape with the talisman, without a scratch. Then what?”

Ginger shrugged as if it were obvious. “We come here, lock the door behind us, have great sex, and live our lives.”

She arched her brow. “With Roach?”

“Of course. Roach deserves to be here as much as…” She paused, then looked up at Aurora. “As soon as we find a way to talk to him, I’m telling him you said that.”

She laughed, reached over to Ginger’s Pip-Buck, and clicked the screen off. With the compartment dark again she felt a little more comfortable suggesting the possibility that lingered in her mind.

“So we’re all here, the door’s locked, and the generator’s spinning again thanks to a stolen talisman. What stops Primrose from trying to take it back?”

Ginger was quiet as she tried to suss out the point she was getting at. “The door,” she finally answered. “It’s impenetrable.”

“Maybe,” she hedged, knowing full well a conversation like this would be shouted down from anyone else in the Stable. Doubting their home’s security wasn’t a crime, but it was as close to one as a resident could get without crossing that line. She, as well as the other pegasi who worked, lived, and breathed all aspects of Mechanical, had a better grasp of reality than those who had the luxury of not knowing what it took to build a Stable in the first place. “Maybe not. Primrose has resources no one else in the wasteland and a fragile ego to match. If she figured out we used Tandy to root around in her head so that we could rob the Enclave, I don’t think she would let a Stable door stop her from evening the score.”

She listened as Ginger took a long, slow breath and blew it back out. “She did almost kill this Stable once already.”

It was a pill Aurora was still trying to swallow. Seeing the same thing happening now take place two centuries ago had been surreal. Knowing that the damage Primrose caused with her stunt was the reason behind their talisman finally exhausted itself only made bargaining with the mare that much worse. By accepting her “gift,” they were complicit in sealing away the truth of Primrose’s crimes from the rest of the world.

And yet the alternative meant dropping her family, friends, and neighbors back onto a deadline they couldn’t afford. Even now, Stable 10 was slowly dying. The Gardens had been overharvested and there was barely enough clean water left to ration, let alone resources or energy to process and purify their waste. There was no contest that Primrose stood the most to gain, but Aurora wasn’t about to put pride before the survival of hundreds.

The war was in the past and she was sick of getting dragged down by things that happened generations ago.

“She did.” She hugged Ginger closer, staring through the dark. “I don’t want to give her a reason to try it again.”

Ginger didn’t need much convincing to accept her logic, even if she did it with audible reluctance. It was possible the mysterious Tandy had reasons for not divulging her abilities until now, or more likely the creature didn’t want to involve herself in the petty grievances of the waking world. Could anyone ever be certain how a creature born from a dead princess’s magic experienced existence in the first place?

“Next time I’ll ask her about it,” Ginger murmured. “Not tonight, though.”

“Why not?”

The soft click of Ginger’s hoof against the Pip-Buck’s screen punctuated the silence. “This gadget has a clock. We need to be up in an hour.”

“We could do a lot in an hour.”

Ginger elbowed her in the ribs and she cried out with feigned injury, pawing at her exasperated sweetheart with cloying wings as she sank back down to the mattress. When she was sure she wasn’t coming down to join her, she chuckled and set her head in Ginger’s lap. “You’re no fun.”

There was a smile in Ginger’s voice when she spoke. “Go back to sleep, and leave that alone. I’ll wake you in a little while.”

She shut her eyes, her muscles relaxing. “We can keep talking about stuff.”

Dim light lifted her mane behind her ear. “Sleep.”

There was no arguing with the gentility in her voice. She drifted off to the sensation of magic in her mane, Ginger’s faint heartbeat in her ear, and the endless possibilities of a future on its way to them.

“Is that it?”

Sledge took a swig from his canteen before capping it and putting it back in his desk. On his terminal screen, a single pegasus in black uniform stood on the platform outside the Stable with his gaze fixed on the lone security camera that had witnessed so much already. A wooden crate lay at his hooves on the stained concrete. As promised, he was visibly unarmed.

“Looks like it. Have the deputies wake the colonel and make her ready for the exchange. I want that door open for as little time as possible.”

As Opal left for Security, he let himself breathe again. His heart pounded in his chest, nerves jangling. He couldn’t shake the knowledge that if this Enclave chose to, they could easily rush the Stable door as soon as it rolled open. They didn’t have firepower like the organized soldiers outside did. He did what he could to gather himself but there was nothing he could do to dispel the unspoken terror lurking in his head.

On this side of the door was order, cooperation, and community. Out there stood a wasteland filled with chaos, misery, and violence. And the only thing keeping one from overrunning the other was the word of a mare he never met whose wings were stained with the blood of billions.

He paced the length of his office, pausing only to reaffirm the presence of the lone soldier at the threshold of his home. He hated this. He hated that the survival of everything he knew hinged on the charity of a mass murderer.

Minutes ticked by as he waited, privately wishing the Enclave would pack up their guns and leave the talisman behind. As if to answer him, the stallion positioned behind the crate looked back into the tunnel and gestured for something to be brought to him. At first Sledge thought the small black object another soldier passed to him was a revolver like the ones his deputies carried, but the pegasus knelt and started passing the object over the concrete in long sweeps with his wing. Dark, black letters appeared on the platform in front of him. Charcoal. He was writing with a charcoal stick.

When the soldier finished, he stepped back to let the camera see the message he’d written:

He shuddered and kept pacing.

Aurora and Ginger were the first to arrive. He forgave them for looking like they’d just crawled out of bed. They likely had. It was early enough that most of the Stable was still asleep, and yet he knew the bolt-action rifle slung over the tired mare’s shoulder was in better wings than anyone else he could call upon. He paused long enough in his endless walking to pull the canteen from his desk and toss it to Aurora, who drained it without coming up for air. For being medically dehydrated and undoubtedly dealing with her own anxieties, she looked nice. Her mane and tail flowed with loose curls that reminded him of her mother. He kept those observations to himself. Compliments flustered Aurora, and he wasn’t anywhere near the right headspace for idle banter.

They loitered around the open door, forcing Opal to squeeze between them when she returned. “The deputies got the colonel and Rainbow Dash ready t’ go.”

He grimaced. “Are they sober?”

“Found ‘em sleeping in separate cells, so I suspect so. Didn’t occur to me to ask.”

On the terminal screen, the lone soldier stood behind his message like a statue. Sledge grit his teeth and sighed. “Nothing we can do now. Let’s get moving before our courier loses his patience.”

As they filed out of the office and rounded the Atrium catwalk, all he could think about was how this was going to be a disaster. Opal, Aurora, Ginger, Rainbow Dash, and even Colonel Weathers knew the truth of what had happened. He mentally kicked himself for so flippantly divulging the vault of buried history they’d uncovered. Doing so opened up a thousand opportunities for any one of them to complicate the most vital transaction in Stable 10’s existence, and now he could only wait for any one of them to bubble to the surface at the least opportune time.

Chaser and Stratus greeted them at the security office, ushering them in with the half dozen lightly armed deputies of their shift. For the first time in as far back as he could remember, the mostly ceremonial revolvers in their holsters contained live ammunition. It had been a difficult call to make, as none of them could be reliably called an accurate shot, but without electricity to run the fabricators their options were limited. If things devolved into shooting, he hoped his people would do enough damage to make the Enclave remember them.

Rainbow Dash and Colonel Weathers stood outside the last empty cell tying off what appeared to be a serious discussion. Something Rainbow was saying had Weathers visibly annoyed, and her body language as she interrupted suggested they were far from agreement on whatever it was they were discussing. Alarm bells went off in Sledge’s head and he quickly crossed the gap between them before they could cut him out of the conversation.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Ask her,” Weathers said.

He turned to Rainbow, his expression stern. “I’ve got the Enclave waiting outside. Spill it.”

Without a second’s hesitation, Rainbow squared her shoulders and met his gaze. “I’m going outside.”

He blinked. “No you’re not.”

“I’m not asking for your permission. I’m telling you as a courtesy, because I consider you to be a friend.” Her milky eyes darted to the others waiting behind him before returning to his. “I want to see what they did to my sky.”

Weathers’ posture shifted with quiet unease as Rainbow spoke, suggesting she had some part in her sudden fixation. He set his jaw and tried to keep his tone level. “Rainbow, this exchange is happening now and I need it to be over and done with as fast as possible. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for you to take in the scenery.”

She didn’t flinch. “Then lock me out if you have to. I’m going out there whether you want me to or not.”

His frustration nearly got the best of him as he instinctively turned toward the lockers beside the decontamination chamber doors and strongly considered putting his hoof through them. This was the complication he’d been dreading, and she wasn’t backing down. Meanwhile, their ignition talisman was sitting on the ground less than a hundred yards away.

He turned back and stared flatly at Weathers. “Why did you put this in her head?”

The colonel scoffed back. “I’ve been advising her against this since she brought it up last night. Her mind is made up, overstallion. She knows the risks.”

He didn’t accept that. “Rainbow, there’s an army out there. You don’t know how they’ll react to seeing...”

“An Element of Harmony?” She looked past him to where Aurora and Ginger stood in feeble silence. “A ghoul? I don’t care what they think. The last time I saw the sky, it was on fire. My dad died out there. If I’m going to live here, I want to see what’s left.”

“Rainbow, we don’t have time to argue about this.”

“Good, then let’s not.” She turned from him with a harsh flick of her tail and faced the decontamination chamber. “Ginger, would you be so kind as to get the door?”

Ginger hesitated when their eyes met, but instead of helping him convince Rainbow to abandon this compulsion she mouthed a silent apology to him and hefted open the doors on both ends of the chamber. One by one they followed Rainbow under the arches until only Sledge and Opal remained.

“She’s going to get herself killed,” he murmured.

“That’s her choice t’ make,” Opal whispered back. “She knows you gotta do what’s right fer the Stable.”

And he hated that she was right. He could throw Rainbow into a cell until this was done and hope she’d forgive him like Aurora had, but he didn’t think he could face the guilt of watching her roam the Stable knowing her one chance of seeing the world she left behind had been stolen away. It didn’t make his decision any easier. If anything, it made it worse.

“Opal, I need you to go down and wake everyone in Mechanical that you can. Let them know what’s happening and that I want them in the Atrium ten minutes ago. Tell them to be ready for a fight. They’ll know what to bring.”

Opal nodded. “Yer not gonna let it get that bad, but I’ll tell ‘em anyway. Good luck, Sledge.”

She wrapped one of her fragile wings around the bulk of his foreleg, squeezed once, and left. When she was gone he went to the Atrium door and kicked the jack handle out of the wall. The heavy chains buzzed and the door slammed to the floor with a thunderclap that echoed across the Stable.

Then he turned and made his way toward the antechamber, steeling himself for whatever came next.

Aurora jumped at the impact of steel behind them. Down the ramp ahead of her, Rainbow and Weathers glanced behind them but showed little concern. They were too occupied with their irritation with one another to give something so minor their full attention. Aurora looked to Ginger as they descended the slope toward the behemoth geared seal sunk into the antechamber wall, trying to cling to her waning courage as memories of her escape flashed across her mind.

Her heart felt ready to jump out of her throat, but she kept her cool. She wasn’t leaving this time. Not if she could help it.

The four of them lined up behind the gate of the catwalk’s extension. Ginger licked her lips and nodded reassuringly to let Aurora know everything was going to be okay. If the Enclave wanted a fight, she would gladly bring one. Already, golden light swirled over the faint shadow of char ringing Ginger’s horn, a memento from what felt like years ago. She’d gotten a lot of practice between then and now. Aurora too. She suppressed a frustrated curse as she wrapped Desperate Times in her feathers and fumbled her grip. Her rifle was in the best condition it had ever been in, but the Enclave’s decision to uninstall the brass hooks Ginger had crafted made handling it a new challenge.

She propped the butt beneath her shoulder and flicked the safety.

Ears pivoted at the sound of approaching hoofsteps. They all stole a quick glance at Sledge as he approached the console behind the upper railing, but the bulwark ahead of them needed little help pulling their attention forward again.

“This exchange needs to happen quickly,” he began, his voice echoing without need of amplification. “Keep the chatter as close to zero as possible. Today is not the day to settle any grudges. There are a thousand lives in this Stable we are all responsible for.”

Aurora tried not to react as Rainbow’s expression soured.

“Aurora, you’re receiving the talisman. Verify it’s inside the crate they brought and get it inside. Colonel Weathers, you’re free to leave as soon as she tells you.”

Weathers nodded. “Copy.”

“Ginger, I’m told you have a talent for creating shields?”

She smirked at that, her horn radiating potent energy. “You better believe it.”

“Good. I want you to put one in the breach as soon as the door starts rolling. If anyone tries to fly in before we’re ready, make sure you conjure something sturdy enough to break their noses.”

Aurora watched her break into a grin.

“Rainbow?”

The Element of Loyalty grit her teeth and stared forward.

“Be careful out there.”

Something in her faltered just then, and she managed something of a nod. Her lips moved but the words were barely a whisper, easily drowned out by the pensive breath drawn and released by Sledge as he plugged his Pip-Buck into the console.

“Here we go.”

The emergency lights visibly dimmed a breath before the abrupt thunder of machinery coming to life flooded the antechamber. She squared her shoulders to chase away a resurgence of unpleasant memories as the dense armature swung from the ceiling toward the complex locking mechanisms recessed within the centerpost of Stable 10’s outer door. Heavy pins cranked inward freeing the gear to move, and it did so with a bellowing groan of protest as the armature heaved it toward them. Beside her, Ginger took an instinctive step back. Aurora could only mouth it’s okay within the cacophony and hope it reassured her.

The cog seated itself into the deep set tracks behind the Stable’s skin and, slowly, began its plodding roll away from the opening. Aurora gripped her rifle tightly. As a crescent gap opened wider behind the gear the amber shimmer of Ginger’s shield materialized within it like a translucent cork. As the door continued beyond its halfway point, Aurora found herself squinting into the bright lights of a familiar scene.

The Enclave’s encampment had hardly changed since she last saw it two days ago. Tents of varying quality drew tidy lines down the length of the flagstone path, some adorned with simple signage designating a purpose other than sleep or storage. A thin smog of smoke clutched the uppermost arch of the tunnel’s vaulted ceiling, churned up by a few small cookfires near the walls. Yet instead of the walkways buzzing with activity as they had when she and Ginger first arrived with their escorts, only a few uniformed pegasi were visible. They kept together in a few disparate clutches, as if corralled there before the rest of their unit departed. And it was quiet. Deathly so, as it had been the first day Aurora left home.

Waiting on the platform just a few yards away stood a single soldier dressed in black. His uniform was pressed and pristine, forming to his modestly toned frame as if the fabric were sewn directly to his coat. He wore no nametag, patches, or pins save for one: two black wings stood open at the points of his collar. A crate, its planks dry rotted and caked in dust, rested at his hooves.

The soldier said nothing, watching Ginger’s shield widening between them with placid curiosity before his gaze shifted down to the four of them. He looked at each of them for a moment, one by one, his expression never deviating from the neutral mask he wore. He didn’t appear to recognize Rainbow Dash, nor did he show any visible compassion toward the colonel when their eyes met. His unnatural calm dragged pins and needles up the back of Aurora’s neck.

Seconds passed with both sides staring across the threshold, waiting for the other to make the first move.

Aurora swallowed, her throat cottony as she took a step toward the catwalk bridge. “Lieutenant Colonel Cedar?”

He didn’t respond.

“You don’t talk. Got it.” She gestured at the box. “Open the crate. Show it to me.”

The silent stallion turned his dark eyes toward her for a moment before looking down at the crate and sliding his feathers into a slim gap between the lid and the frame. All but two of the original nails had been pulled from the pale wood, and the lid came free with little effort. It clattered to the floor and he lifted the crate with both wings, slightly tipping it toward them.

Aurora clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering as she limped forward toward the shield, her hoofsteps reverberating against the catwalk as the nameless stallion did the same. As they met at the barrier she looked him over for guns, knives, anything that could conceivably be used as an ambush weapon, but saw nothing.

He held the crate up as if she needed enticement to look inside. Nestled into a bed of deflated straw lay a six sided stone barely larger than Aurora’s hoof and blacker than she felt should be possible. It was like looking down at the absence of something, and yet there it waited. The ignition talisman she, Ginger, Roach, and Julip had risked their lives to find in time.

The urge to reach out and snatch the crate from the soldier’s wings was overpowering, but she managed to resist it. Something about the stallion screamed DANGER in her mind and she couldn’t work out why. Then her attention shifted past the talisman and to the crate itself. She looked up and watched the soldier’s face but his expression hadn’t changed. It was like staring into the eyes of a statue.

“Put the box on the floor and move back.”

He did so with uncanny obedience, leaving the open crate at the edge of Ginger’s shield.

“Ginger, make me a hole.”

A cavity opened in the barrier a little more than a foot in diameter and Aurora wasted no time releasing her rifle and sliding her empty wing through the shield. She reached down and plucked the stone from the desiccated bedding. The soldier remained perfectly still as he watched her pull the talisman through the shield, though for a split second Aurora thought she saw him holding his breath. As Ginger sealed the gap Aurora watched the stallion for several long seconds, but he regarded her with little to no interest.

She clutched the talisman tightly in her feathers and turned away before he could do anything profoundly disturbing like sprout a second head or unhinge his jaw. Deep down, something told her that stallion was a monster in every way as the centaur herd lurking in the Pleasant Hills. The faster they shut him outside, the better.

She could hear him pick up the empty crate and return to the outer platform. As soon as her hooves reached solid ground inside, Colonel Weathers wasted no time stepping onto the catwalk. Rainbow Dash followed in her wake without a word, shuffling her conspicuously single wing as the stallion stepped aside to let both of them pass. Both of them were in a hurry to leave for reasons that were their own, but Rainbow’s abrupt departure tugged at her.

“Is that our talisman?”

Sledge’s voice pulled Aurora back into the present. She looked down and opened her wing, then closed it again. There was no mistaking it for what it was, but she would run it past Carbide once they got down to Mechanical just to be sure. Primrose had made good on her word.

Stable 10 had its ignition talisman. By the end of the day, the generator would finally be up and running again.

“Yeah,” she murmured. Then, so he could hear her, “Yeah, this is it.”

She felt a tiny smile perk up the corner of her muzzle at the relief she saw washing over Sledge, but as the walls trembled with the sudden movement of the Stable’s door Aurora couldn’t help but feel as if the culmination of all her friends’ efforts were falling short of the simple happy ending she’d hoped for. The gear rolled down its track, pushing aside Ginger’s shield. She watched as the gap shrank to a sliver, then disappeared entirely as the impenetrable door put a period at the end of too many unfinished stories for her to count.

As the armature shunted the door into its final position and the locks sank themselves deep into the walls, the elation she assumed she’d feel didn’t come. Instead she found herself gritting her teeth against the lump growing in her throat. She missed them already, and she had a feeling it would be a long time until that feeling went away.

Her thoughts swirled but Ginger was there to make the grief easier to bear. She cleared her throat and swallowed her sadness as Ginger nosed into the gap under her empty wing, drawing it across her back with a bittersweet smile that creased her eyes. “They’ll be okay.”

Aurora nodded, knowing she wasn’t just referring to Rainbow Dash and the colonel. “I know.”

She didn’t know and that was what hurt the most. Yet as they turned away from the door and climbed up the ramp to where Sledge waited, she knew this was the only choice their friends would allow them to make. Roach and Julip had risked more than she could have asked of them to ensure this moment could come to pass.

The ignition talisman they had fought and nearly died for weighed heavily in her feathers. In these wee hours of the morning, the Stable that spent weeks waiting for salvation lay asleep not knowing it was finally here. She clutched the black stone a little tightly and forced herself to smile.

“Life’s messy,” she conceded, “but at least we’re here, right?”

Ginger touched her head to Aurora’s neck. “It’s a start.”

It certainly was.

“Let’s go turn the lights back on.” She nudged forward and Ginger helped her along, with Sledge carrying up the rear. They were done fighting. Now came their time to live.

“Okay, we’re clear. Do it.”

Seconds passed and nothing happened. The only sound in the room came from the busy chattering of servers, Delta’s exhausted lungs, and the rapid pulse of her heart. It had been little less than an hour since their world plunged into darkness. Thanks to the coordination of Firelight’s team in Mechanical, they were ready to crawl out the other side of this nightmare.

She dragged her grease-stained feathers across her brow, her body still recovering from the exertion. After going down to fill Firelight in on what had happened, she couldn’t justify running back upstairs to wait for them to reset the generator. Before her life in the Stable, she’d lived and breathed heavy machinery. The rockets in her junkyard were heaps, but they were heaps she’d been able to refurbish and sell back to Jet’s competitors at a steep markup.

On her way out of the control room, she’d noticed them throwing their collective weight into a makeshift prybar in an attempt to manually realign the seized rotor. She wasn’t a mare who shied away from doing what needed doing, especially when two of Firelight’s own had died to stop the generator from self-destructing. They would have gotten the job done without her, but she felt compelled to shoulder some of the burden anyway. Mechanical, more than anyone, had grown used to suffering their unenviable work in stoic silence. If what little help her meager frame could offer took some of the burden away, especially now, it would be worth it.

Stable 10 shuddered. A deep, subaudible vibration she could feel in her bones. She turned from the master terminal and listened for Thunderlane’s confirmation.

“It worked!” he shouted from the open door. “Power’s back on!”

Over the radio, Firelight’s voice crackled above raucous cheering. “You should be seeing lights coming on, Delta.”

She gave her wing a single, fierce pump. “We see them. Tell your people they did amazing.”

“Don’t celebrate yet.”

She had begun to get a feel for Firelight and could tell he was a cautious stallion. Considering the disaster they’d just averted, wariness was a desperately needed trait right now. “We’re at seventy-percent power and holding. There’s… moderate oscillation in the superstructure. I’m seeing blown fuses all over the place.” He hissed a sigh. “The hard shutdown caused a lot of damage. We’re not going to be generating full power for several weeks at least.”

“It’s better than nothing,” she said, her attention back on the terminal in front of her.

She’d been watching the server logs for any more rogue commands coming in from the outside, but the entries were clear. No activity. Server 75, where the first breach originated through, chattered away without so much as a hiccup. Not a single line appeared out of order and there were no programs running that showed any interaction with the generator’s software. Whoever orchestrated the attack was completely cut off.

She exhaled the breath she’d been holding and pressed down on the radio. “How’s the talisman looking?”

“Diagnostics show stress fractures from thermal expansion. Not much we can do about that besides hope it doesn’t crack on us.”

“Then be gentle with it.”

He chuckled. “Will do. I think we can take things from here but if we need help I’ll ping your Pip-Buck, okay?”

She nodded before remembering he couldn’t see her. “Okay. If it’s critical, have Millie call me. I’m going to be pretty distracted for the next few… well…”

Days? Years? As she logged off the terminal and started walking toward the hallway door, she reminded herself that there was no precedent for what she was about to do to Spitfire. She deserved violence. She deserved to be put in the ground and have the dirt watered with piss. She deserved to be strung up on a post and held aloft for every refugee of every Stable to see, and listen to them berate her for the blood on her hooves.

“Still there?”

He jarred her from her thoughts. “Yeah, sorry. I gotta go.”

“Come down when you’re free. My guys want to buy you a drink.”

A smile touched her lips as she nodded to Thunderlane, who was watching her approach with a grin of his own. “Will do. See ya.”

She handed the radio back to Thunderlane as she passed him, leaving the stallion and his security team to tackle the unenviable job of fielding questions that were no doubt already on their way to him. They would be busy dealing with crowd control for a good long while, which meant Delta had a healthy window within which to work.

At least the lights were back on and fresh air was flowing again from the overhead vents. She inhaled deeply to reassure herself things were going to be okay again. Maybe not for her, but for the rest of Stable 10.

Already, residents were beginning to filter out into the corridors. Some still carried flashlights in their wings while others squinted against the sudden renewed glare. Delta felt a tiny bolt of pride as she passed by clustered neighbors quietly sharing their collective relief, knowing deep down the “electrical hiccup” as it was described by a chuckling stallion had come within the barest breadth of turning their home into a mass grave. Now, for the first time in her life, she was the one keeping secrets.

By the time she reached the Atrium, work had already begun to clean up the mess created by the blackout. Several pegasi had started picking up dropped plates and sweeping up the wet shards of toppled glasses. The floor around one such glass had been stained pink where someone had either slipped or stepped on a broken shard. Diluted blood tracked into the nearest storefront where Delta assumed first aid had been sought. The hollow slosh of a mop bucket rolled out from the little bread shop she liked to aid in the cleanup.

Her attention shifted to the pop-up stage where the Remembrance Day banner had already been taken down, leaving two empty posts in its place to frame the medallion window of Spitfire’s office. The shutters were closed, and as she climbed the steps up to the second level catwalk she saw that the door was too. Her hackles went up. If there was ever a time to at least fake she was a decent, compassionate leader, this was absolutely it.

From under her greasy shirt she produced her laminate and swiped it through the door’s card reader, but instead of the cooperative little chirp she expected the reader blinked red and blurted a harsh buzz. She set her jaw and swiped it again, and again it denied her. She cursed at the monolithic door and glared up at the tiny lens embedded directly above it.

“Open the door, Spitfire!” She got up on her hind legs and slammed her front hoof against the surface. With pressure back in the hydraulic systems, overriding the steel slab with a jack handle wasn’t going to work. She banged again, getting her nose as close to the camera as she could manage. “Open the fucking door!”

Nothing. The eyes of the Atrium were on her now and Spitfire’s door remained firmly locked in place. Delta imagined her calling Thunderlane to come throw her in a cell. Worse, several pegasi in the Atrium looked concerned enough by her outburst to intervene without security’s help. She spat a curse under her breath and jammed her laminate between the card reader and the wall, shoving as much plastic into the gap as she could until she could slip one, two, two and a half feathers under the device.

Someone on the ground floor shouted that she couldn’t do that but she ignored their warning. She pulled back on the reader hard until the screws stripped out of the concrete. Stable-Tec’s lackluster internal security finally paid off as she tore the braided wires from their housing and shorted them together.

The door sprang open. A final yank ripped the wires out at their roots and she threw them and the useless reader onto the catwalk. She stepped inside, stabbed her wing against the switch drilled into the wood paneled wall and grit her teeth as the door thumped shut behind her, locking her inside.

Seated behind her desk sat Spitfire, her face damp and matted from crying and a half-empty bottle of expensive looking liquor standing open on the polished mahogany. Spitfire didn’t so much as look up at her. Her eyes were miserably fixed on the amber liquid, the yellow feathers of one wing slowly tracing the contours of the label. The broken fragments of a telephone lay forgotten on the floor near where Delta stood. A dent in the paneling marked where it impacted the wall.

Delta hesitated. This wasn’t the mare who berated her hours earlier. That Spitfire had been confident, conniving, and stood proudly upon the pedestal she believed her participation in global genocide earned her.

The Spitfire slouched over her desk wasn’t that mare. Something important had happened here. Someone else had ground Spitfire into a beaten shell of herself.

“I hope you’re fucking happy.” She stormed across the office until she stood at her desk, dropping a hoof onto it with enough force to make the overmare flinch. “That’s two more corpses down in Mechanical for you to throw onto your pile of millions. Two more fucking innocent souls,” she beat her hoof against the desk to emphasize each word, “who you snuffed out.”

Spitfire ignored her and reached for the bottle. Delta’s temper flared. She slapped it out of her wing with her own, blowing back Spitfire’s bedraggled mane in the process while the bottle detonated against the far wall, sending a hailstorm of glass and rich liquor dribbling into the fronds of a potted fern.

Her voice shook. She dropped to the carpet and began to pace. “I should kill you. I deserve to kill you for what you did to Jet, to our daughter…” she grit her teeth and willed the tears to stop. “You erased everything that made life worth living, and why? Did you get tired of it all? Did you decide that if someone was going to push the button you may as well beat them to the punch? Why the fuck couldn’t you have suck-started a shotgun like a normal mare?!”

Spitfire muttered something she couldn’t make out like some brooding, sullen teenager.

“What did you say?” She waited, but Spitfire didn’t repeat herself. Delta stared her down, trying to work herself up to do what needed to be done. “If you’re so fucking chatty then tell me why. Why did you murder billions of innocent creatures just to hide underground in this fucking time capsule?”

She swept a wing toward the shuttered window. “And why did you try to kill them?! They had no idea what I found! You had me contained and you still thought, fuck it, might as well kill everyone all over again? How fucking unhinged are you?!”

Spitfire lifted a brow, her eyes still fixed on her smeared desk. “I didn’t do this. Primrose did.”

Her pacing ground to a stop as she eyeballed the graying mare. “Oh, so now you’re innocent! Someone else greenlit global genocide! Fuck you!”

Spitfire snorted, looked up at her with her red-rimmed eyes, and nodded with a tone dripping with sarcasm. “Like I said, I didn’t do any of this.” She flicked a feather up at the lights, making it perfectly clear she wasn’t denying triggering the apocalypse. “You’re as much to blame for what happened here as she is.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with the blackout. That shit’s on you.”

Spitfire’s chair squeaked as she sat up, her eyes narrowing. “I tried to keep this from happening. You’re the one who went digging. You’re the one who set a self-replicating virus loose on the network. You’re the one who couldn’t keep her high and mighty yap shut about things she knows nothing about!”

Her wings shot out from beneath the stains in her shirt. “YOU KILLED MY CHILD!”

Spitfire rose from her chair and stabbed her hoof at the door. “AND YOU NEARLY KILLED ALL OF THEM.”

The sudden force in her voice was a stumbling block to Delta’s indignance. She wanted to hurt Spitfire. Badly. A different version flicked through her head with each passing second. It would feel good. It would be right. It would bring a small shred of right to a horrifying wrong.

And she couldn’t do it. As she watched Spitfire plant her hoof into her chair and send it skittering away, fear began creeping back into Delta’s chest. A deep, familiar certainty that what she was building herself up to do would backfire not just on her but to those close to her. And although Apogee was gone, and Jet was gone, all of them who had survived the same crippling losses were here. They weren’t family, and she didn’t know all their names, but they were as close as she would ever get in whatever amount of life she had left to live.

That fire blazing inside her stuttered for just a moment.

It was long enough for Spitfire to round her desk and descend upon her. She attempted to step back but Spitfire closed the distance like a mare on a mission, the ridge of her wing pressing into Delta’s chest like a bar as she shoved her back into the shuttered window. The painted steel slats crackled behind her as Spitfire pinned her there just as she had hours earlier in Delta’s office.

“Prim wouldn’t have done any of this if you hadn’t gone looking for answers.” Sweat and the stink of Spitfire’s liquored breath floored Delta’s nostrils. “I’ve had to work to keep that little psychopath happy for a decade and you ruined it.”

Her lip bent. “I’m not the murderer here.”

Spitfire sneered and put more weight behind her wing. “Tell me how I did it.”

The brazenness of the question took her off guard.

Spitfire shook her head and smiled more widely. “Remind me why I did it.”

She didn’t know. The realization landed on her like a sack of rocks, and whether it was Spitfire’s weight squeezing the air from her chest of her own total uncertainty of what she actually knew, Delta suddenly felt unsteady on her hooves as she understood where Spitfire’s logic was headed.

“Do you know what they say about you?” Spitfire looked past her as if she could see the entire Stable. “They read the tabloids. They know you spent your life pushing conspiracies about secret Canterlot societies and publishing rumors about the ministries. Sure, you’ve mellowed over the years, but deep down they remember the crackpot you used to be. What do you think they’ll say if you try telling them their overmare was secretly behind the apocalypse? Do you really think they’ll believe you?”

They wouldn’t. Spitfire was right. No one in their right mind would believe her without proof.

Her gaze shifted to the black bulb mounted in the corner of the ceiling behind Spitfire’s right shoulder. Swallowing, she lifted a feather toward it. “There’s footage.”

Spitfire cocked a brow and glanced at the camera. “That? No audio, I’m afraid.” She took her wing away and stepped back, watching Delta like a predator playing with its prey. “And I don’t think you’re short-sighted enough to share our conversation from earlier. Do you?”

Delta stayed rooted where she was, her thoughts spinning as she tried to make sense of what her options were. “What makes you think I won’t?”

“Because I’m the only monster in this room.” She tipped her nose toward the door where, already, they could hear someone on the other side working to get it open. “Use your head. Even if by some miracle some of those ponies trust you enough to believe you, more will think you’ve lost your mind or worse. All you’ll manage to do is sow resentment and doubt among the other residents, and we’ll be a weaker Stable for it. Nothing will change except maybe for the survival odds of the generations who come after us. Five hundred years is a long time for unresolved anger to fester, Delta. Don’t tell me you can’t see that spiraling out of control.”

Her throat went dry. “It just did spiral out of control and we stopped it, no thanks to you. They deserve to know.”

“They deserve to live.” Frustrated, Spitfire rubbed the bridge of her muzzle and sighed. “Just… take a step back and try to look at the whole picture. This is bigger than you and me. You found something you weren’t supposed to and Primrose just tried to kill everyone here to keep it buried. If she’s capable of remotely coffining a Stable because one resident knew the truth, imagine what she’ll do if she finds out we survived and everyone knows.”

Delta looked to the door, wanting nothing more now than to leave before this conversation soiled her more than she already felt. “She can’t do anything to us anymore. I cut us off from the network.”

Something changed in Spitfire’s demeanor upon hearing that. Her brow lowered and her gaze fixed on something in the middle distance. The gears were spinning faster now and Delta felt herself being pulled in.

“Then you bought us time.”

She recoiled. “Don’t say ‘us.’”

Spitfire looked up at her, calculating. “Delta, just put this whole hunt for justice of yours aside for one minute and listen to me. I didn’t do what I did alone. Primrose and I were partners, and if she’s playing the long game like she always talked about, then this isn’t a problem that’s going to go away.”

Wary of the shift in her tone, Delta watched Spitfire with growing concern.

“Primrose is sheltered in place in the Ministry of Technology sublevels which means she and her followers have the resources to survive a trip to the surface if they feel motivated to take a walk. Stable 10 is a threat to every ambition she has. If the Enclave finds out we’re still alive, they’ll use every tool at her disposal to get inside and slaughter every last pegasus here.”

Spitfire paused and looked at her expectantly. “Unless.”

Delta shut her eyes and swallowed the sick that threatened to rise in her gullet. “Unless nobody knows what we know.”

She nodded. “Hate me as much as you need to, Delta, but don’t become me. Don’t subject them or their unborn foals to another apocalypse to satisfy some selfish urge to tell them something they’ll never believe. Let them live their lives believing in a better future. Don’t kill them with the truth.”

A familiar, gnawing chasm opened up in her chest. This was what it felt like to lose no matter how hard she worked. Once again she was either too selfish, too tired, or too late to do any good for herself or those around her. Spitfire won the game ten years ago when she burned the board. She was right. No one would believe a mare known for trying to get others to see the things she saw. Anyone who did would be burdened with the same stigma, mistrusted and seen as something lesser. Armageddon had given her a clean slate but no one truly forgot who she had been.

And now, armed with tangible proof that the world hadn’t ended the way they thought, a monster named Primrose whom Delta didn’t know existed until today wanted to doom them all to die in the dark to keep that proof buried.

“The only shield we have left is ignorance,” Spitfire murmured. “You have to erase it. All of it.”

She swallowed. “You’re talking about ten years of our lives, gone.”

“It’s the only way to convince Primrose every shred of evidence against her has been purged. Everything your virus dredged up, every phone conversation I’ve had with her, every byte and millisecond of it. It needs to be gone. It’s the only olive branch we can extend to her after we’re both gone, and believe me the next generation will need it. If she ever finds out Stable 10 is alive and the truth survives with it, she will do everything in her power to wipe this place from the face of Equestria.”

Delta shook her head in abject silence. “Nothing the two of you haven’t done before.”

Spitfire didn’t so much as blink in response. “So, can you have it done by tomorrow?”

She grit her teeth, tears welling as she bit down on the last shred of dignity she’d held onto, and nodded. “Sure,” she choked. “Why not. I hope you’re happy with all the misery you’ve caused.”

“I’m not.” She gestured to the door. “Please, for their sake, do the right thing.”

She swept the damp from under her eyes, flicking it off her feathers as she turned to the door. Ten years of their history, a decade of stories brought here by stallions and mares who had no idea their overseer was responsible for the cataclysm that trapped them here in the first place, gone forever. One last grand casualty.

Do the right thing. If her gaze could burn, the carpet beneath her hooves would be ablaze. If Spitfire wanted her to sweep their problems under the rug, she would. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be waiting there for someone else to find them. If there was a monster lurking among the ashes of their lives, their descendents deserved to know who they were fighting.

She couldn’t erase the truth. She wouldn’t.

A plan formed in her mind.

Breadcrumbs.

She would bury their history for someone else to find. Someone clever enough to do the right thing with it when they found it. She only hoped she wouldn’t cause them too much trouble when they did.

Delta met Spitfire’s eyes, her decision made.

“Don’t worry, overmare. I’ll get it done.”

Rainbow kept her eyes forward as she traversed the tunnel.

The colonel had fallen in beside her, visibly unsettled by the vacant encampment. Neither of them commented on the eeriness of the empty tents they passed, or the disassembled piles of black rifle components heaped behind the flaps. To their left, a pair of stallions lingered like stowaways near one of the cookfires, watching them with uncertain suspicion. Weathers squinted at them as if she were trying to place them from somewhere, but recognition didn’t seem to come to her. A second group of a dozen or more pegasi looked to be a mix of officers and possibly civilians. Rainbow had no way of knowing if the Enclave sent soldiers into the field without some kind of kit, but the way they spoke in hushed voices made it clear they knew one another on some level.

“What are they doing here?” Weathers muttered.

Rainbow hadn’t the first clue who they were, let alone where they belonged. She decided not to ask yet. Weathers had yet to commit to a position against the Enclave, even after a night of brutally hard liquor in the company of the Stable’s bewildered bootleg brewer. All she’d been able to gather from the colonel’s brooding was that she was furious and felt betrayed. And yet she still wore the uniform. She still came back to her people.

The tunnel was too quiet. Their voices would carry, and the stallion who brought Aurora’s talisman was following behind them.They both had too much on their minds to risk letting what they knew slip here, where something was undeniably wrong. Even now, Rainbow could spot movement at the tunnel’s edge. Their uniforms helped them blend in with the night sky beyond, but as they drew closer she was able to see the soldiers awaiting their commander outside.

She wouldn’t be safe out here, she was certain of that, but she’d come to accept it as the better option compared to the alternative. Her mother’s adopted son and the brother Rainbow never had a chance to meet had fathered foals of his own. She had family here. Staying in Stable 10, remaining among them while Colonel Weathers left with knowledge of her survival, would endanger all of them.

Sledge wasn’t a natural leader any more than she had been when her Element fell around her neck. But he was smart. He would figure it out, and in time he would understand.

They passed the utility room that Roach used to keep her safe and calm. Small rocks scraped beneath their hooves, marking the edge of the mound formed when the bombs set loose the rockslide that would trap her and so many other evacuees. The debris had been dug up and carted away, marked only by a widening carpet of dirt and deeply scarred flagstones. At the tunnel’s end her breath stuck in her throat.

It was night outside. A cool breeze curled into the opening, though she could hardly tell if it smelled fresh or not in her condition. Even so, it had been centuries since she’d seen the night sky. It was the place she could always retreat to when the drudgery of the war effort was too much to bear. The press could arm pegasi with all the cameras they liked. They were never able to keep up with her let alone snap a photo that Rarity or Twilight might drag her into an office and across the coals over.

They approached the tunnel’s end and her pace slowed. She saw the unnaturally dark, dirty clouds rolling across the distant sky. Weathers hadn’t been lying about the eternal overcast. Her heart sank. Primrose and her Enclave had stolen the stars.

There wasn’t anything she could do about that now.

Four soldiers broke away from the gathering at the end of the tunnel and began making their way toward them. It didn’t take long for Rainbow to notice they were dressed in the same featureless black uniforms with the onyx wings pinned to their collars. No names, no ranks, no insignias to speak of. They made Colonel Weathers, who had stepped ahead of Rainbow to meet them, look overdecorated by comparison.

An average sized mare from the group of blanks held up a white wing, halting their progress. Unlike the courier following behind them, these soldiers weren’t unarmed. Each of them wore heavy automatics over their shoulders and blocky pistols clipped to holsters strapped to their forelegs. Now three steps ahead of her, Weathers extended the tips of her left wing away from her hip as a subtle gesture for Rainbow not to approach.

The soldiers slowed to a stop a few yards from the tunnel’s terminus, forming a loose line of firepower they clearly did not want either mare to cross. Weathers stopped, with Rainbow behind her, both of them able to see the colonel’s soldiers milling about in a loose throng just outside.

“I didn’t expect the minister to dispatch her mutes for a delivery mission.” Weathers rolled her shoulder as if unbothered enough by their presence to work out a kinked muscle while they talked. “Anything I should be aware of?”

The stallion walked past them, the empty crate tucked beneath his wings, and took off into the open air. Rainbow watched him depart. Her body ached for the chance to follow.

The mare who had stepped forward stared silently at Weathers, content to simply stand in her path. When the colonel made to side-step her the black clad mare did the same, her eyes narrowing. Behind her, an identically uniformed stallion who couldn’t have been older than twenty was watching Rainbow with growing interest. His brow furrowed slightly as his gaze found its way to her mark, but he made no indication to the others. He only stared.

“My soldiers are waiting for their commander. Step aside.”

Several of those soldiers had already spotted Weathers and were watching now, a low murmur growing through their ranks. The mare stood her ground, her wing still held forward to forestall their progress. Weathers stepped toward her anyway, and in the span of a breath many things happened at once.

The mare sprang forward and slammed the gap between them shut. Her left wing had clamped down around the back of Weathers’ neck, pulling her chin into the barrel of the pistol she’d snatched from her holder with the other. The young stallion eyeing Rainbow swept up his rifle and leveled it at her skull, while the two remaining mutes spun around and raised their weapons toward the gathering soldiers outside who shouted in fearful response. Several who had been trying to inch close scrambled to back away, many of them sparing furtive glances skyward as if unsure of their ability to escape unharmed.

Rainbow froze in place, eyes wide. The mutes calmly watched from behind their gunsights like predators monitoring a pack of lowly scavengers.

Weathers looked down past the pistol jammed under her chin, all the bravado in her voice stripped away as she kept her towering frame deathly still. “Don’t shoot. Please, ma’am. I apologize. I was out of line.”

The mare stared at her for several agonizing seconds before removing her wing from the colonel’s neck and dropping the pistol back into her holster. The others followed suit without showing so much as an ounce of concern, as if the last fifteen seconds were among the least noteworthy part of their day. Weathers dutifully took several steps back before turning into the tunnel, blinking rapidly as she fought her rattled nerves.

Rainbow backed away and followed her, trying not to throw up. She’d never had a gun pointed at her until now and her body was already protesting the flood of adrenaline by urging her to dump her stomach onto her hooves.

“I need to get to a radio.”

She swallowed her gullet, trying hard to resist temptation to look behind her. “Why?”

“Because of the pins on their collars. Those pegasi are members of the Black Wing. They’re mop-up specialists.”

Rainbow frowned back at the loose group of pegasi in mixed attire. “And them?”

The colonel eyed them with something like pity. “If I had to guess, they’re the ones the mutes were sent here to deal with.” She lifted a feather, picking one of them out. “I’m pretty sure the fat one is General Sachet. He’s one of Security Director Clover’s staff. If I had to guess, they all are.”

It clicked in her head where she’d seen those cold, suspicious looks before. They were the same inscrutable stares that Rarity’s staff would level at her whenever she visited the Ministry of Image. These were pegasi forged in a world of mistrust, subterfuge, and secrets. Only now they were far from their classified documents and secure files. Behind those professionally opaque expressions lurked something more primal and simple: fear. They had been taken here for a reason, and that reason was something they were desperately trying to rack one another’s brains to undermine.

Her throat felt full. The dispassionate way that young stallion had leveled his rifle toward her told her exactly how far plotting would go with them. He’d been close enough to see his own reflection in the element around her neck and hadn’t so much as flinched.

“They didn’t come here with you?”

“No.” She murmured, her attention shifting to the two stallions near the cookfire. The tall one, a lavender pegasus, stared in exasperated silence while the other made strange shapes with his feathers. It took her a moment to recognize it for what it was: sign language.

“And neither are they.” Her jaw flexed and she diverted into the tents toward them. “Follow me.”

This was already too much to deal with, but it wasn’t like she was spoiled for choices. She hissed after her. “Who are they?”

Weathers glanced back at her and shrugged. “A pair of soldiers up to no good. I can make that work for us.”

Ginger’s heart raced.

The talisman felt like the most fragile thing in the universe. She held it against her chest with her magic, equal parts giddy and terrified as the sheer importance of such a small thing began to feel real. This little stone would pave the way forward for the hundreds of pegasi living in this Stable. Within its black facets rested an unfathomably deep well of magic that would ensure the safety of generations to come, and more well after she and Aurora were gone. It was wonder, power, and dread all at the same time, and Aurora had entrusted it to her care as Sledge led the three of them to its ultimate purpose.

Each step down to Mechanical terrified her. Flashes of awful potential appeared in her mind as she agonized over what might happen if she tripped on the stairs or stumbled over a threshold. She never told Aurora about the first talisman she and Roach recovered from the bottom of the bunker beneath Stable-Tec Headquarters, or the awful moment when she realized Ironshod’s errant gunshot had reduced it to useless fragments. Especially now, she wouldn’t dare admit she had briefly possessed the singularly most vital artifact to their Stable’s survival only for its destruction to be the price of Aurora’s rescue. She would never do that to her.

She clutched the talisman a little tighter and shooed off her irrational worries. She wouldn’t trip. It wouldn’t break. And as if sensing the presence of her protective aura, the talisman thrummed a little more eagerly in her grasp. Even it was hungry to be put to work.

The stairwell ended and Sledge held the door to Mechanical open for her and Aurora. She almost caught herself liking the faintly acrid odor of machine grease and solvents lingering in the still air. A tiny smile tugged at her lip as she imagined herself down here with Aurora, learning to break down machines with the goal of repairing them rather than selling their components for caps. Maybe she would like it? It couldn’t be any worse than trying to predict the sparse fashion senses of the wasteland, and with Aurora helping her learn she was guaranteed to love one thing about it.

Carbide met them in the vast cavern that made up Mechanical’s main workhall, carrying a well worn red mug in his wing. In the other dangled a bulging operator’s manual whose pages were festooned with tiny paper tabs. He raised the lighter of his two loads in greeting with an exhausted, but nonetheless amicable grunt before tipping the rim to his mouth with a slurp.

“I made coffee,” he said as Sledge led them into the grid of workbenches. The overstallion chuckled and made room for Carbide to fall in beside him, accepting the manual as they crossed toward the bulwark of the generator hall. “The Jenny should fire up on her own once the ignition talisman’s in place. Flux has the first shift inside going over the calibration sheets. I wasn’t down here when it shut itself down, but she says it stopped hard.”

Ginger glanced at Aurora. She had her ears perked toward the conversation ahead of them, absorbing every detail.

Sledge nodded. “Warm her up slowly, then. If she runs rough, then she runs rough. We can worry about busted bolts after Sanitation gets a handle on the wastewater situation.”

“Can’t say I blame you. I’ve never seen the cisterns so low.”

He sipped his cold coffee and stole a glance at the talisman in Ginger’s grip. For a split second he seemed ready to say something to her, but settled on smiling with something like disbelieving appreciation. She realized, as he looked away, he hadn’t expected them to get this far. He was still processing it. As they passed through the open doorway to the generator hall she assumed it would be some time before any of them really came to grips with how close their Stable had come to collapse.

Just like the first time she’d been brought here, she found herself in awe of the space dedicated to this one machine. Even in the dim yellow glow of the emergency lights she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking up at the still heart of some titanic creature. Unlike last time, however, the hall bustled with activity as the pegasi of first shift ran last minute checks on the massive generator and the plumbing that spread out beneath the floor they stood on. Most of the floor panels had been locked in place, save for a few where Ginger spotted a pair of wings and the odd set of hooves half-sticking out from the cramped spaces inside.

They gathered near the generator and she watched with open curiosity as a stallion, whose jumpsuit was conspicuously missing, pushed up from an open panel to retrieve some sort of brass nozzle attached to a large gauge and disappear back into the void with it. A few seconds later a sharp, punctuating hiss echoed in the open air and the stallion reappeared, nodding to himself as if satisfied with the results of whatever it was he had done. He climbed out and bent down to reach the loose floor panel, then noticed he had an audience behind him and all but clapped his tail down between his buttocks. Ginger did her best not to react, but Aurora wasn’t nearly as charitable. Her unashamed grin carried with it an unmistakable note of pride as she watched the stallion pack up his tools, slide the floor panel into its frame, and scurry off to who knew where.

“The infection spreads,” Carbide chuckled.

Sledge snorted. “Show’s over. Let’s get to work, people.”

Even as Sledge dropped the manual besides his now purely ornamental talisman containment chamber, Carbide shot a knowing smirk back at her and Aurora. The lights might be dead, the air stale, and their futures hinging on the functionality of a talisman whose inner clockwork none of them understood, but none of it could dampen his jovial mood. While Sledge cracked the manual to review the appropriate pages, Carbide crooked a feather to beckon them to a familiar hole in the floor. Its proximity to the railing around the generator left little guesswork to where it led. Ginger had been inside one of these crawl spaces before.

“It looks worse than it is,” he assured her as she approached the claustrophobic chute. Her gut did a tiny flip at the sight of so many pipes and wires, remembering how narrow the passage had been beneath Stable-Tec HQ. “It’ll be a tight squeeze, but according to the Big Book of Fixery the process should be pretty straightforward for a unicorn. You’ll be looking for a removable panel with a bunch of warning symbols on it. The talisman chamber is on the other side of it. All you should have to do is line that thing up with the contact points and… well, give it some juice.”

She blinked at him, hoping there would be more instruction beyond “give it some juice.” Mercifully, he keyed in that she wasn’t following without having to be told and tried again.

“You need to prime it, like an engine, except you’re using magic instead of gasoline. Does that make sense?”

She looked down at the stone. Even in its inert state, she could feel it gently tugging at her magic like smoke being drawn away by a draft. “I think so. How do I know how much it needs to start working?”

Carbide looked past the two mares to where Sledge squinted at the manual. “The book didn’t say. Can’t be much though, can it Sledge?”

“All it says is the unicorn performing the installation must be a certified Stable-Tec Technician. I’m guessing it needs a small kick and not much else.” He arched a brow at her. “Don’t you go voiding the warranty on my generator. This thing needs to last three hundred more years.”

She made a mental note to tell him to comb for any ticking timebombs left lurking by Stable-Tec. It hardly paid to go to the lengths they had to resolve one crisis only for another to spring up years later. “I’ll be careful,” she promised, her gaze turning back to the hole in front of her hooves. She floated the stone toward it, allowing her amber light to penetrate a little deeper into the void. “Just… tell me when you’re ready.”

Sledge scanned the manual one last time before shrugging his ruddy shoulders. “I don’t see the point in waiting. Let’s get you down there and ready to plug us in. Carbide, go make sure Flux’s team is prepared in case the beast wants to buck.”

She wondered if he knew the old world connotation of what he just said and decided to leave it. They watched Carbide trot off to the control panel where several unfamiliar faces chatted behind the observation window before turning her attention to the crawl space waiting for her with a growing sense of dread. This was it. This was what it had all been leading to.

“Hey.” Aurora’s feathers curled beneath her chin, pulling her eyes up and away from the chasm. She was smiling as their lips met, and for a blessed moment her fears evaporated into Aurora’s warmth. She wanted it to last longer, but the mare who stole her heart away before it could progress into something more intimate. They weren’t alone, after all. “You’re going to be okay.”

She flushed at hearing her own advice. How long ago had it been since she watched Aurora bury her head in the dirt, overwhelmed with fear when she heard the gunshot from that Epicurean convoy leader execute one of his own just yards below their hiding spot on the ridge? Outside the protection of Junction City, it had been the moment Ginger realized how unprepared for the wasteland Aurora was and that her survival depended on the support she and Roach gave her.

They had come a long way since then.

“We all are, aren’t we?” She looked down at the talisman and smiled. “I should go plug this in, shouldn’t I?”

Aurora grinned and nodded.

There was no sense in waiting. Drawing the talisman tight to her chest, she steadied herself with a breath and squeezed herself into the narrow passage beneath the floor. The light emanating from her horn and the aura wrapped around the talisman helped guide her forward as she wriggled through what could only be charitably called a maintenance shaft. Barely three yards in, a pipe thicker than her foreleg intruded through the suffocating crush of conduit at a ninety degree elbow, forcing her to roll onto her shoulder and empty her lungs just to drag herself around it.

Unlike the generator hall below Stable-Tec HQ, Stable 10 was deathly quiet which allowed every scuff and thump of her scrambling hooves to echo like a beaten drum. It unnerved as much as it aggravated her. The sound of every movement was amplified by the lack of any other sound making her progress sound like the mad scramble of a mole rat caught in a trap. On more than one occasion Aurora called down to ask if she was alright, and each time she called back in the affirmative. She felt a powerful temptation to try propelling herself forward with magic alone but having only used magic on herself once before at the bottom of Stable 1, she wasn't going to gamble breaking something vital on a second frivolous attempt. Testing it now, where half of her movements were slowed just to prevent the talisman from scraping against exposed bolt heads, sounded like an awful idea.

She was out of breath by the time she reached a section of exposed wall paneling fitting Carbide’s vague description. The tubes and wires that harassed her all the way here bent parallel with the panel’s seams as if to frame the myriad of warnings who might otherwise miss them. Only one stood out that she cared to read, because she’d seen it once before:

She rolled onto her side, ignoring the cable clamp digging into the dock of her tail as she did, and noticed a slight blueing around the panel’s seams as she pulled it away. She didn’t know much about machinery, but she did know enough what happened to some metals when they were superheated. Evidence, she decided, of Primrose’s attempt to kill Spitfire and the Stable by forcing their ignition talisman into an unstoppable death spiral. Only it hadn’t been unstoppable. Delta Vee, the mare whose daughter’s body still rode SOLUS on its endless elliptical journey, had found a way.

She slid the panel between her belly and the maintenance shaft’s wall. The view that greeted her on the other side was underwhelming. The glass-lined cylinder of the containment chamber, identical to the chamber she’d plucked the first talisman from in Fillydelphia, stood empty. The dim glow of her magic shimmered off its vaguely iridescent walls reminding her of the strange way Carbide’s makeshift box shuffled the ambient light. Two conical protrusions made from the same fragile material extended toward one another like a stalagmite reaching up toward its twin. Not long ago this empty space contained a vortex of raw magic capable of driving the massive generator seated above it, but all that remained in that talisman’s absence was an empty glass-lined container and the faint smell of ozone.

She lifted the new ignition talisman up in front of her eyes and tried to imagine living in a world capable of storing so much potential into something so small. The answer to the war that would eventually lead to the world’s destruction was right here, silently sipping away at the magic holding it aloft.

She shouted into the shaft. “I’m at the chamber! Tell me when!”

Sledge’s voice rumbled back. “Waiting on you!”

“Okay,” she whispered to herself. “Here goes nothing.”

With a gentle push of will the talisman floated past the opening and into the chamber. Light glittered across the glass, briefly reminding her of the days her mother and father would take her to the Chapel of the Two Sisters for services every Saturday morning. On special occasions the factories burrowed into the cracked slope of Canterlot Mountain would cease production just long enough for clear, natural light to filter through the thinning overcast. She smiled at the bittersweet memory and wondered, for the first time in a long time, whether they had done alright without her.

Focus, she chastened herself.

The stone’s obsidian points drifted into alignment with the chamber’s internal contacts. She waited for a breath before remembering the last step. It needed a little kick to start working. Holding it there, she could already see the subtle bending of the aura around it as it sipped from the faint power surrounding it. The sensation felt familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She would ask Carbide about it when she was done. For a pegasus, he seemed to have a decent handle on ignition talismans.

She dipped into her gifted magic and directed it toward the talisman. A little kick. She braced herself as the aura around the stone momentarily intensified. And then, in the space of a thought, the power concealed within its fractal prison awakened.

Pain erupted across her body and the scream that clawed its way out of her lungs distorted and reverberated across shuddering air. Something was wrong. She could feel the talisman’s power burning its way across the connection between her and it, dredging through her body like flames licking their way across a puddle of spilled diesel. Dread plunged her heart into her stomach as terrible understanding coalesced at the center of the hurricane ripping her apart from the inside. She knew this feeling. It had been familiar because she’d felt it before. That terrible, acrid burning Tandy had warned her away from when she dreamed.

Her eyes flung wide as emerald light pulsed within the false talisman and a deep, creaking agony clawed at the inside of her skull. It didn’t stop. It didn’t ease. It was building, folding onto itself, amplifying the reactions taking place within it until one of its black facets fractured.

Balefire boiled from the breach.

Without thinking, driven by instinct alone, she shoved her hooves into the chamber and wrenched out the burning stone. She didn’t hear the noise shredding her throat nor the bewildered shouts from the pegasi just a few feet overhead. She pulled the talisman against her chest and clamped her magic around the crackling stone, forcing its pieces together by sheer power of will.

It pulsed again, violently.

An involuntary sob shook her chest as she kicked her way forward, curling herself into the containment chamber to turn around and crawl back the way she came. Thick, stinking smoke boiled around her as the erupting stone burned the coat around her belly and seared the flesh underneath. Her hooves slammed into cables and kicked off pipes she’d been so careful about on the way down, knocking connections loose with no thought other than to hold the talisman together until she could get it clear of the Stable.

Her vision blurred and her magic stuttered, but she clawed it back into place around it. The fire devoured her aura nearly as quickly as she could pile it around its source, a fight she couldn’t put up forever. Primrose had lied to them. She didn’t want Stable 10 to survive. She’d wanted it gone from the very beginning ever since Delta Vee dug up the truth. Two centuries later, the little tyrant had gotten her wish. And she used the desperate dreams of two nobodies to plant the seed of its final destruction.

Suddenly she felt herself being wrenched up from the shaft by strong wings and heard the awful peal of Aurora’s scream. Something was wrong inside of her but she couldn’t tell what it was. Her eyes stung too much for her to open them more than a crack, but it was enough for her to recognize the container resting nearby on Carbide’s cart. The talisman released a powerful thrum of hateful energy as she lifted it toward the chamber, and in that brief moment she nearly slipped. Vomit bubbled up her throat but she held it down with a miserable groan, knowing at this point her life was forfeit. All she could do now was delay the inevitable.

She couldn’t spare a drop of magic to open the box so she used her teeth. She didn’t know if it would work, but if it failed they would never feel a thing. She opened the top of the chamber, sank the boiling stone into its fractal confines, and slammed it shut.

Her connection to the stone broke.

She took an agonizing breath and wished she knew how much time they had.

“Aurora! I need you!”

Feathers wrapped her shoulders. She was already here. Of course she was already here. “Ginger, what happened? What is that thing?!”

Emerald flame gyred around the floating talisman like a strengthening storm. She wrapped her waning light around the cube and could feel it growing warm. It wouldn’t last. None of this would last if they didn’t act right now.

Blood coated the back of her throat as she answered.

“It’s a balefire…” she groaned, struggling to breathe. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Aurora, she sent us a balefire bomb.”

She was right. Aurora could taste the metal on her tongue as if she were back in Kiln. Primrose never wanted to help them. Somehow she’d found out they knew the truth. It was the only explanation that made sense. She never cared about the preservation of Spitfire’s chosen pegasi. She wanted it carved out of the bedrock entirely.

What better way to accomplish it than to deliver a balefire bomb to those very pegasi and wait for them to activate it themselves?

Sledge and Carbide were already shouting at Flux and her crew to evacuate. She stared after them as they fled the generator hall, eyes wide and full of fear. They wouldn’t be fast enough. Tears stung her eyes as she remembered the crush of corpses pressed against the blast doors of Stable 1. There was no way to alert everyone, not without power. Not when so many doors needed to be lifted manually. This was Primrose’s gift to her home. A violent, instantaneous death.

Carbide’s chamber emitted a bright crackle as one of its six panes started to fail. Ginger’s shield crushed in around the rupture and Aurora watched helplessly as wild balefire went to work devouring that amber light. Slowed, but impossible to stop, emerald flames pressed harder and harder toward the tipping point when the explosion would rip through her magic.

They had to move. “We need to get it out of here.”

Ginger let out an agonized gasp as Aurora ducked under her blistered belly and lifted her onto her back. She was hurting her, and it took everything Aurora had to steel herself against those awful noises. Her voice shook as she spoke. “You need to hold onto me and the bomb, okay? Don’t let it go!”

An awful heat bloomed above her ribs as Ginger reached out and clutched unspooling death in her hooves. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Balefire sizzled against Ginger’s waning power like a hot iron. Aurora locked her jaw and swallowed the roaring pain in her throat. There was no time to reassure Ginger. There might not be enough time to make it to the stairs, let alone climb them. But it was the only option left.

So she ran.

She dodged around open floor panels and dove through the generator hall, the dull throb of her only remaining hind leg a distant memory as adrenaline swept her forward. Mechanical’s workfloor was alive with fearful energy as the last stragglers scrambled toward the stairwell door, their eyes widening with dismay as they saw Aurora rushing after them. She shouted for them to get out of the way and they shouted back with wordless fear as she carried Ginger into the jammed stairwell.

There were too many bodies to push past. Her heart sank. “Get off the stairs!!”

Her voice was lost in the cries of confusion above. This was how it happened. This was what killed a Stable. Not a bomb, or poison gas, or bullets. Panic did. Panic was going to kill Stable 10. They had to get ahead of them.

“Ginger, get your hooves around my neck and don’t let go.”

She pushed herself up enough to straddle Aurora’s throat with one hoof, while she held onto the bomb with the other and the guttering remains of her magic. “Nnngh… okay. Go.”

Her wings flung open in the narrow stairwell and she kicked off the floor, launching herself into the narrow gap between the bottom of the stairs above and the heads of the terrified pegasi below. Shouts and screams erupted behind her as she half-flew, half-trampled her friends and coworkers, kicking off their backs and pushing against the walls to maintain her reckless ascent. Someone beneath her threw a balled wing into her stomach as she clamored over them, nearly causing her to stumble and fall into the crush. Somehow she managed to stay upright and by some miracle Ginger maintained her grip. The crowd thinned as they reached the front where Sledge and Carbide were bolting up the steps, shoulder to shoulder.

She dropped onto the landing behind them and shoved her way through the gap between them. Out of breath and limping heavily with every third step, she managed to force past them and shout over her shoulder. “GET TO A TERMINAL! OPEN THE BLAST DOOR!”

She prayed he understood. They would find out in short order if he didn’t.

The last steps were clear except for the concerned pegasi who heard the commotion coming from the lower levels and were now peeking out onto the landings to see what was happening. The confined walls shone with the menacing light emanating from the splintering chamber clutched under Ginger’s hoof, warding the onlookers away before they could slow Aurora down. She could smell copper in her sinuses as she burst through the door at the top of the steps, practically knocking a curious stallion over as she threw her wings wide in the open corridor. She threw them back, desperate for speed, but the stagnant air only allowed her to glide in short bursts. It was something.

The Atrium spread open around them. She threw herself airborne and landed gracelessly on the catwalk outside the security office. Deputy Chaser stood back in startled confusion as they burst through the open door and past the cells. “We’re almost there,” she shouted.

Ginger whimpered back. “Hurry.”

It was all she could do. As they fled through the decontamination arches she stole a quick look back at the bomb. Her vision blurred at the sickening sight of Ginger’s flesh blackening and cracking in contact with the superheating chamber. She could feel the same thing happening to herself just inches below the joint of her wing and knew deep down there was no medicine that could fix what the balefire was doing to them. This was a one-way trip. Their only hope was to limit the death toll to two.

The antechamber greeted them with empty air and a sealed door. For a brief moment it felt as if her heart stopped. Panic seeped into her thoughts as she considered the time it would take to plug into the console and navigate the menus to the test cycle she used to free herself weeks ago. She swallowed her anger at Sledge and started toward the console, but was cut short by the sudden thunder of the armature. Relief powerful enough to induce giddiness soothed her tortured body. She looked back to the security camera watching her from the decontamination chamber door and hoped Sledge was somewhere he could see and hear her.

She choked back the rock in her throat as she spoke to the unblinking lens.

“Close the door behind us.”

Maybe he heard her. Maybe not. There was nothing she could do for it now. The armature had already engaged the recess at the center of the massive cog. She carried Ginger down the ramp, her heart pounding in her ears. It slid back and began to roll. She widened her trembling stance and opened her wings as far as they would bear, watching the doorway yawn open.

Ginger buried her face into Aurora’s mane, her grip tightening.

Her feathers clapped down with an audible rush and they shot through the gap. The bright lights of the tunnel streaked toward her as the slight angle of their escape sent them toward one of the columns. With her wings finally free to move she banked around it and once again thrashed both limbs behind her to pour speed into their escape. The Enclave encampment blurred beneath her aching legs and she had just enough time to notice that the tunnel was empty. The soldiers had gathered outside for reasons she didn’t have time to understand. She streaked through the air above their heads and pumped her wings hard into the early morning dark.

A cacophony of shouts chased the two of them, then a familiar staccato crackle. “They’re shooting!”

Ginger pushed her muzzle against her ear. “Higher. As fast as you can.”

A bullet buzzed by inches from her chin. She could feel the vibrations radiating from the failing chamber amplifying and her bones sang with unnatural resonance. As she pitched toward the distant clouds she looked back to see several dark figures giving chase, their positions marked by their flickering muzzle flash. She almost felt sad watching them try so hard to recover a bomb primed to unleash death the exact moment Ginger’s shield broke. They likely believed dying in the act of salvaging their unraveling mission was better than submitting themselves to the mercy of Primrose. She didn’t blame them, nor did she care.

She turned her eyes skyward, focused on putting as much distance between their awful payload and her home. The clouds drew near enough for their features to blur. Dark mist enveloped them and bloomed green. Her muscles burned but she flew anyway. Higher, faster, pouring as much of herself into claiming another mile, another yard, another foot between her and the home whose future was now sealed.

Stable 10 would not have its ignition talisman. If it survived the blast Aurora could feel building between them, her family and friends would fall to the mercy of the wasteland. She didn’t want to think about what that looked like but she had seen enough of this broken world for her thoughts to be deterred.

The clouds broke and the two of them rocketed into the crystalline black sky beyond.

Her only regret was that Ginger was here with her. Aurora deserved this death, that much she accepted. Ginger didn’t. All she had done since the day they first met was show her compassion and now… this.

The bomb pulsed hard enough to make her feathers shudder.

“Aurora,” she groaned. “It’s happening.”

She threw her wings shut and didn’t reopen them. Momentum alone carried them toward the stars. Gently, Aurora turned herself in Ginger’s faltering grip and met her eyes one last time. The tears she’d been fighting flowed freely now. The bomb held between them ebbed and swirled as balefire carved deep into the amber shield containing it, its motions growing violent like a wild animal sensing an opportunity to escape its trap. Ginger stared back, tears skimming the blue seas that Aurora fell in love with what felt like a lifetime ago.

The wind around them slowed, softened, and grew silent. Surrounded by infinite shades of night, their fates and pursuers forgotten, they were weightless.

“I’m sorry,” Aurora whispered.

“Don’t be.” Ginger reached out with her charred hoof and touched her cheek. “You gave me a chance to do something good.”

Her shield guttered. Balefire lanced through the gaps. Distantly, Aurora noticed the amber flow around Ginger’s horn brightening. One last attempt to buy them precious seconds after their clock had run down to zero. Regret, clear and unmistakable, trickled into Ginger’s eyes. She was concentrating on her.

Amber light crawled around Aurora, and her eyes widened. She gasped. “Please don’t.”

The bomb kicked. The shield began its collapse.

Her lips twisted into a pained smile. “I’m sorry. It’ll follow me through.”

Ginger’s final spell bloomed to life, and as magic pulled Aurora away she lashed out with a wing and clutched across the boiling air between them. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me. For a fleeting moment she reached her. Feathers curled and blackened around Ginger’s foreleg and they were together like they were always meant to be. Then a sob that was not her own reached her ear. A metallic click. Ginger stared across the emerald glow with mute apology as her hoof slipped away, leaving an empty Pip-Buck in her grasp.

For one terrible second they hung there, their fates decided. Two new stars suspended in a resplendent cacophony of predawn beauty.

Ginger smiled with a simple solemnity. “I love you.”

Aurora opened her mouth to rail against the last remnants of magic swarming around her. The sky jerked away and she tumbled, screaming, the words dying in her throat as the teleportation spell hurtled her clear of death.

The bomb detonated. She felt it.

Dusty, wooden floorboards rushed up to meet her hooves, and she knew.

Ginger was gone.

Next Chapter: Chapter 41: Fallout Estimated time remaining: 23 Hours, 41 Minutes